Arcane Heart
by writerfan2013
Summary: She has a gift, but she doesn't know it. The golden key made her forget, and he must keep her secret close in his clouded heart. But danger has followed him to this world, looking for her. AU but it should all seem very familiar. And of course there's romance. Lizzington. Now Ch 20 - falling.
1. Chapter 1

"It's all about giving yourself the best chance."

He puts his hand on the kid's shoulder. The scrawny bedroom is dark, the linen none too fresh. Sounds of a raucous drinking game come from the other room in this apartment at the top of a rundown Brooklyn brownstone. There is a full moon outside and its light stripes the rough misery of this room.

The four year old turns away and stares at the insides of her eyelids.

"You're too young to know what's best, yet," he says. "This time, I'm giving you the chance. From now on, I won't be around. You'll have to start finding those chances on your own."

He waits, watching the small body hunched up under the covers. Her hair still smells of smoke. It is on him, too - his suit is ruined.

"I don't like these people," she mumbles through the comforter.

"I didn't bring you here to make friends. Learn from them. Become them. And forget me."

"I don't wanna forget you!"

The child is in her voice but as she faces him at last, the anger and hurt in her eyes is beyond her years. She doesn't understand, but Red does. A war is coming. Power has shifted. There has been theft, and now revenge, and soon counter revenge unless Red thinks quickly.

He hopes her father's place is still burning. Pity he wasn't in it after what he did to Red. And now Red must get back, look loyal, and dodge the wrath which is crackling in the firmament

Red sighs. The kid is hidden here in this minor world, as safe as she can be, as unknown as she can be. "Forget me," he says and uncurls his gloved fist to show her a golden key, wrought in filigree like a queen's fanciful birdcage. As Elizabeth's eyes focus on the key, Red repeats, "Forget me."

She closes her eyes and sinks back down. He pauses, running his hand through his fair hair down to where it trails over his collar. Moonlight aches on his skin, clogs his lungs. He swallows a reflexive cough.

Droplets of light have sputtered all across her face, but the sizzle lasts less than a second before evaporating back up to the thousand junk orbits which are its origin. Red breathes out the last of the stuff in his lungs and turns to go.

The key he leaves on her pillow. By the time he reaches the tatty door of the thieves' rookery, she is asleep, and he knows he is gone from her mind forever.


	2. Chapter 2

The first war is brief but intense. Government agents pound the network of stealers until every safe in the city is smeared with fingerprints from both the fibbies and the thieves.

Raids are daily and brutal. The thieves seem able to conjure open any locked door in the city, and nobody can ever remember any details about the heist - _were the robbers male, female, tall, short, I just can't say, officer_. The police are increasingly frustrated and the Feds have been called in.

Red crouches in thin snow behind his unmarked car, gun ready, and contemplates his new career. Since his spectacular destruction, fresh out of training, of a drug lord's nest, he has been a golden boy at the FBI. His bizarre insistence on hunting for evidence of a sinister stolen power source has been overlooked in the light of his brilliance. He is the best of the best, yada yada, but his early orders to work from within a powerful organization in this world have been rescinded, and it is time to return to business. The homeworld is turning to new, backwater markets, and Red must earn his keep here in this hitherto unimportant little corner.

Shots echo around the graffiti-ed streets of Hell's Kitchen. Red tenses. Whatever happens, he must not let any of the gang approach him.

Red watches as a girl dressed in black, her brown hair littered with harsh blonde highlights, leaps lightly down from a second floor window of the building across the street and sprints away. She is certainly a thief, almost certainly carrying something valuable. Red's orders are to shoot and disable all members of this gang, the last and most resilient of them all.

He ignores the orders and instead watches the girl run, her every step as perfect and precise as the brush strokes of a Hockney or a Hopper. She would be, what, nineteen. He hasn't seen her in ten years, and she hasn't seen him in fourteen.

She is fast. She is practised. She is a consummate thief, just as he hoped she would be. She has never been caught.

He blinks, and feels his heart rate increase. This is like the moment of breaching an enemy bolt hole, like the first launch of a Sunseeker at Monte Carlo, its keel striking the water with flawless efficiency. Like the sparkle waiting inside the bottle of Moet, or the shiver of amazement the first time you ever see one of the tiny golden charms.

This girl, running, fleeing as the rest of her gang are rounded up, is better than any of those things.

As she turns a corner and escapes, Red leans back against the flank of his car and closes his eyes, feeling his old weakness. He sees sunlight on a glittering sea, but his chest clenches turning every gleam to black.

"What the hell happened?" yells his boss, scrambling past. "One of them went right by you!"

"Sorry," says Red. "I wasn't watching."


	3. Chapter 3

The club is old fashioned, with high ceilings, heavy Persian carpets, faux-oil lamps and lashings of dark panelling. Red approves. A silent waiter brings the right kind of brandy in a carafe and places it and two glasses on a little table beside him. This room is notionally the library, where members can relax after dinner with reading or conversation. In fact the conversations held here are almost entirely illicit, with money or favours changing hands in returning for information. It is known by regulars as the mole room.

Red never used to see this kind of place, not on a government wage. But now he works for the other side. He shifts in his beautifully textured leather chair and admires the architecture. If you leave morality out of it, which he does, then this is the life.

"Cheers."

Red touches his glass to that of the silver haired man sitting in the next chair. Both men sip, and savour.

Seeing them from the outside, the forces of good are weak and ignorant. Red marvels at how his erstwhile government can have eyes and ears in every city on the globe, and yet miss so much. The homeworld has made great inroads into this undeveloped market, and those who can pay are tasting the sweetness which comes from possession of a totally new power: the golden charms produced by Berlin.

Red keeps his own use of the charms to a minimum. He has the gift, sure - and it tickles Berlin to oblige him to use it, crippled as he is now - but the charms drains him these days, like the first days of influenza, like flying the wrong way around the world. Few of Earth have any way to withstand regular use. And Berlin, still sitting smug on Red's stolen talent, cannot be touched. Berlin doesn't flaunt his stolen power though. He stays in the homeworld and lets his minions orchestrate what will clearly be another very hostile takeover.

Red wants no part of that circus.

No: far better to remain a dealer, a trader of favours. The top players here are becoming so powerful that they dare not quarrel. When offense is taken, they employ Red to extract restitution. He rarely resorts to outright charm when he does. Mostly old fashioned violence and blackmail do the trick. But when it is called for, Red can take a tiny golden charm, fresh out of Berlin's new factory in Macau, from inside his coat lining and hold it up to the enemy's eyes and tell them to forget.

It is his best chance for survival, that his enemies not know him again. But while he can charm his victims to forget him, he cannot magick his employers. And so there has developed an increasing list of people who know his name, and his face. They use him but expect his betrayal every moment.

They are right to expect. Every villain who has ever employed him as their convenience, their arms length, their dirty worker in this world of unnatural power, is now on Red's blacklist. And Berlin, their master, is number one.

The FBI is utterly ignorant of the forces now wielded for profit and power in the criminal world. Berlin runs a tight operation: punishment for loose talk is swift and final. Customers are selected and pre-approved like couples anxious to get their first mortgage. Possession of a key brings entry to an exclusive club, from which conventional political leaders are almost completely excluded.

Almost, but not quite.

"Keep me sweet and you'll be the first presidential candidate to use one," Red tells Alan, a rare customer on the inside of government - American government, a detail which gives Red a little thrill as he thinks of his former colleagues sweating over the giant rise in crime and the mysterious way in which the wrongdoers get away with it.

"I don't want to be President," Alan says. He swirls the cognac around his brandy bubble and chuckles at Red in the leather chair the other side of the club's extravagant fireplace. "Let other people have that hassle. Get me into that factory, Raymond. I want to control production."

"That's Berlin's thing," Red says. But Alan, with his twinkling eyes and grandfatherly manner, will not take no for an answer. "Don't worry so much, Raymond. I can protect you from the fallout of betraying Berlin a second time."

Red's heart goes cold despite the flames three feet from his Oxfords. Alan knows. Somehow, he knows what Red did. He knows the kid is not dead. His mind begins to race with tasks: locate Elizabeth, secure her, plan how to reveal to her the secrets which have been kept so long.

"I have every confidence in you," says Alan, smiling. "You have too much to lose to let me down," and suddenly Red is in deeper than ever.

And meanwhile, as Red demonstrates for Berlin how completely he has abandoned his lawman's badge, Elizabeth has switched sides, changed names and become a cop herself.


	4. Chapter 4

It is lucky Red does not suffer from claustrophobia. This man-sized mason jar, with its airtight seals, might otherwise be a very uncomfortable place, and that's before you throw in the handcuffs and the frankly ridiculous number of firearms trained on him by the fibbies outside.

He really ought to point out that he is in a bulletproof prison and therefore aiming a gun at him betrays a sorry grasp of what that means.

He does not. He has better things to do. The third war is on its way and Red needs to emigrate back to the forces of good. He lacks support. It is difficult to acquire friends when most people you meet must be made strangers again after the transaction.

There are a few, a very few people he can count on. But none know his secret.

"I will speak to only one person. Agent Elizabeth Keen."

The main man, Cooper, is confused. He expected to be extracting intel from Red, not negotiating the terms of his cooperation. "You don't get to pick who you talk to," Cooper says.

Red only smiles. "Then we're done. I look forward to a happy retirement in a federal prison. From which I would of course escape within the first twenty four hours."

"You're wanted in nineteen countries for crimes it would take all day to describe," protests Cooper.

"Be my guest. I am breathless with anticipation."

His handlers are puzzled, but Red is used to that. They try to make him talk - but he merely settles in his seat in their little glass box and prepares himself for a long wait while they fetch Agent Keen.

He does not have long to wait. That is somewhat flattering. He wonders if Alan pulled strings.

But he offers nothing more until a slim figure in black descends the steel stairs into his dungeon, her hands bearing the scars of a vicious burn, her blue eyes deliberately hard, her tight mouth betraying her nerves.

"Lizzie," says Red, and a smile breaks from him unbidden as he sees how she has reinvented herself. "It's been far too long."

"I don't know you," she says, and he realises that despite his plan, his requirement that at this moment she must not recognise him, he has nevertheless been hoping that she would.


	5. Chapter 5

Lizzie Keen has never visited the secret operations centre known as the Post Office, never met a master criminal, never seen anyone handcuffed on a chair inside a bulletproof glass container in a floodlit basement.

She does not know the name Raymond Reddington, or his face, and so she studies him as she waits for his prison to be opened.

He wears a suit the colour of rainswept slate, the coat cut loose so that it will swirl as he moves. The coat lining teems with winter trees against a silver sky, and the buttons on his waistcoat are pale glass domes with tiny whorls inside, like half marbles, or snowglobes.

As Reddington's cage is unlocked Lizzie focuses on those buttons, imagining a tiny world captured inside each one, a button world, of which this man alone is the master. Master and protector.

What an odd thought. Lizzie has read Reddington's file, and he is not a good person. He is a highly trained and dangerous former federal agent. He is brilliant, devious, careful, powerful and ruthless. He kills without hesitation or remorse when it suits his purpose.

Yet the first moment she sees him, she thinks of him as - a guardian of the secret worlds in his buttons?

She has had way too little sleep. And the coffee here is obviously laced with something crazy. She tears her gaze from the waistcoat and looks at Reddington's face.

"Agent Keen!" comes Cooper's voice in her ear. "Are you ready?"

"Yes sir."

Reddington's face is as smooth as a boy's, only the lines around his eyes and the silver in his severely cropped hair showing him as a man in his fifties. He looks relaxed and refined - like a bank executive or an art collector - but the intensity in his gaze makes him anything but ordinary. His eyes, the colour of an Atlantic storm, are steady, and directed only at her.

Lizzie frowns. For a second there she smelled woodsmoke. She gets a grip on herself. This place is climate controlled. Focus. That man in the box has a grisly history

She sits on the chair set out in front of the isolation cell and determines to meet a monster.

And the cage door springs open and Raymond Reddington smiles.


	6. Chapter 6

As first days on the job go, this one has been a nightmare. Partnered with a smiling killer, sent to prevent a child's kidnap and nearly detonating the zoo instead, arriving home at last to find her husband bleeding on the floor of their renovated brownstone - Lizzie is flattened.

She eases out of Tom's hospital room and into the hushed, chlorinated corridor. Tom is asleep after surgery, and Lizzie needs coffee, not so much the caffeine as the warmth, the comfort.

She has not been able to tell Cooper anything about Tom's attackers. There were two of them, or three. Their faces shimmered and slid behind the haze of her fear. She remembers only blood and terror and all details are lost. Tom blacked out the moment she arrived, so that is another investigative dead end. The fact that she can't get past her own fear to help with profiling these thugs only makes Lizzie more ashamed, and afraid.

Reddington was there. She was escorting him back to his five star hotel - his mysterious deal, brokered by someone high up in Government - when the scanner picked up news of a disturbance in Lizzie's street.

"Don't get out," Reddington said urgently, but Lizzie shook his gloved hand from her sleeve and ran to her splintered front door. She heard his painful coughing behind her. It was the last thing she knew before the sight of those - men? - in her dining room blotted out all memory.

Reddington vanished before the ambulance arrived and Lizzie has a sneaking suspicion that despite his tracker implant, he won't be coming back. She is not sorry. Reddington has been an irritation all day, his charm and his monstrosity clashing at the edge of her perception, like a bluejay wheeling against a polluted sky.

Lizzie climbs two flights of stairs to the hospital restaurant and it is shut. She should have expected that after everything else that's happened today.

She finally locates a vending machine in a dim hall, and punches the code for black coffee.

"Add some sugar. You could use the boost."

She jumps and there he is, Reddington, sprawled in a plastic chair reading the Metro section of tomorrow's - today's - newspaper. The headline reads, _Shocking attack at teacher's home._

Reddington stands, his mountain-blue suit draping gracefully, and folds the paper, tucking it under his arm. "It's late. Let me give you a ride home."

Of course. The millionaire criminal mastermind gives himself up to the FBI in the morning, and by afternoon he has a leather-upholstered limo with a bodyguard driver, a quiet-eyed man called Dembe. "No thanks."

"Don't be stubborn. Your so-called husband isn't going anywhere. And you could use some sleep. You've got a big day tomorrow." Reddington holds out his arm to her as if this is a Forties movie and they are going for a stroll through black and white streets.

Lizzie bites her lip. She grabs the coffee and sips it and instantly burns her tongue. "Dammit!" Reddington flicks his eyebrows at her.

He obviously knows she tore up the floorboards after the medics left, and found Tom's cache of passports and weapons. Knows that Tom Keen can have his pick of five other names, and that the torture Lizzie interrupted was not a random burglary gone wrong. "Fine," says Lizzie. "I will get in your car if you tell me what's going on."

"Splendid. Shall we?" And Reddignton ushers her out as if through the foyer of some red-carpeted theatre. Lizzie clamps down on annoyance and walks beside him, just out of reach. He only smirks and opens the limo door with extreme courtesy, which she ignores with matching bad grace.

"You realise you can't lie about the charms forever," Red says, unbuttoning his coat. "Lord knows how you got through the lie detector tests at Quantico. I am in awe of that part."

She stares at him as the car pulls away. It is pretty much a given that nothing he says makes sense, but this is even more random than usual. "What are you talking about?"

Red draws his brows together and purses his mouth. "The charms. I know about your pre FBI career, Lizzie. The gang. You needn't be coy with me."

Lizzie sighs. "Whatever your game is, you won't win. The moment we charge the kidnapper, you'll be behind the biggest, strongest bars Cooper can come up with."

"Oh, do you think?" But he looks puzzled. His eyes scan her face as if her answer surprised him, disturbed him.

Well, points to her, for once. She flings herself back against the buttersoft leather seats and refuses to speak until the limo pulls up outside a stately house.

"You said you'd take me home!"

Red smirks. "I never said it would be your home."

This place has wrought iron gates and more wrought iron cresting the steep French roof. There are giant urns flanking the enormous double front doors. The gates swing open for the limo and Lizzie sees their bright gilding in the headlights.

Gravel flies out from the limo wheels and Red sighs. "Lock it all down, Dembe," he says to the driver. "What little safety I can have, I want it now."

Lizzie climbs out and follows Red wearily into the mansion. He goes straight to an elegant study, crosses its velvet floor and closes the shutters. He snaps lamps on, casting a sunrise glow. Then he turns to her, his face all tender seriousness, and says "Lizzie. If you are as ignorant as you claim, then we have a problem."

She stares at him. The rules of the criminal-FBI agent game are somewhere, but not here. They were a little wrinkled when she woke up this morning and since then they have taken a battering. Now, she thinks, they are crumpled and burnt, tossed into the road outside her house under the wheels of an ambulance. " Ok," she says. "So I'm ignorant. So enlighten me."

Red makes an awkward gesture, one arm stretching towards her, like half a hug, then draws it back. She realises it is the first time she has seen him hesitate.

This ought to make her feel better, but it doesn't. Bleak fears swim in her stomach like fish nosing the glass of their dim aquarium. She sees Red silhouetted, a black shape, hollow, endless.

She smells smoke, the quick dry fumes of a grass fire.

She swallows, and concentrates on her breath, on how she can always keep herself strong and safe when these feelings happen. She is here. She is in control.

Red moves, and his face comes back into the lamplight. His glove touches her shoulder. His eyes are steady again and his voice is slow and certain. "Lizzie. You are in terrible danger."


	7. Chapter 7

"Bullshit," says Lizzie. The yellow lamps in Red's study cast pools of light around their brassy stands, and the rest is velvet darkness. A perfect backdrop for challenge and accusation.

Red blinks at her, keeping his expression still. "I don't lie to you, Lizzie. I will never lie to you."

She is exhausted, he can see. The energy of last reserve burns in her eyes as she says, "What then? Apart from strangers breaking into my home and attacking my husband, what danger am I supposedly in?"

"Tom Keen is not your husband," Red says. "The attack confirms it. And there's something else, isn't there? Something you found."

She is hostile, defensive, resentful. All perfectly understandable, of course, but time consuming. "Listen to me," Red begins. "I need to see the papers you found. I can find out who made them and that will tell us -"

"There is no us," Lizzie interrupts. "There's me, doing my job, and there's you, worming your way into the FBI for your own purposes. Maybe those papers are what you wanted all along. I don't know. I don't care. But I'm not going to give them to you."

She puts her hands on her hips and glares at him. Red feels her fury, like opening the furnace door after the janitor has told you not to. There is the same blast of fire, the same pull in her gaze: the urge to put your hand in the flame, to see how hot, very hot might be.

The study door opens. Dembe stands there, his muscled frame taut. Warm light from the hallway spills past him onto the rich crimson carpet. "Trouble," he says to Red. He holds out a phone.

Red winces.

Lizzie is watching. The lamplight reflected in her dark eyes reminds Red of home, of guard fires set on poles all around the fragile perimeter, of a tense, crackling crowd of adults at the big table, clinking goblets and tossing meat into their mouths, while Red and the rest of the children raced around the edges, dancing along the flickering border between safety and the night.

'Trouble' is Dembe's shorthand for what all that became.

"Will you excuse me," Red says to Lizzie, and slips into the hall, closing the door behind him.

He takes the phone from Dembe and listens. The hall is chilly and his lungs bother him. He has to suppress a cough as the hole inside his chest squabbles with autumn air.

As the end of the call the line goes dead. Red turns to Dembe, whose perpetual frown nevertheless reveals concern. "It's Berlin," Red says, and coughs, as if the mere name can bring on the old weakness. "He's apparently delighted with the progress being made in my little backwater world, and intends to visit so he can oversee it himself."

Dembe presses his mouth tight shut.

"I know," says Red. "A little too much of a coincidence, isn't it. But it gives me hope that those men sent to maul Tom Keen didn't find out what they wanted to know."

"No," Dembe agrees. "If they did you'd be dead already."

"Ever the ray of sunshine," says Red. But he smiles at Dembe. "We'll be breaking camp again tomorrow. But now I have to break some difficult news to Agent Keen, and I think she's going to be hard to convince."

"As I was," says Dembe.

Red claps Dembe's leather-clad shoulder. "Yes, old friend. Now bring us something comforting to eat, would you? I find war talk is far more productive over a plate of fine food."

But when he opens the study door, the shutters have been unlocked, the window stands open and Lizzie is gone.

* * *

><p>Red dreams. He is falling, diving, not purposefully like Superman, but helplessly, grotesquely, his arms flailing, his legs pedalling at nothing. At last he breaks through the crust of the sky and slows, shimmers, slides into a litter-strewn street by Manhattan Bridge just before dawn.<p>

That is not how it happened, how he came here, the first time, but in the dream he has the girl with him, bewildered, and he says, "I know a place you can hide. This is one of my patches."

She is puzzled, turning her face up to him. And instantly she is not four, but thirty, a strong young woman with soft skin and hard eyes, demanding what the hell is going on.

"I work here," Red says. "Sometimes. It's my patch. My place." But this world is nothing to brag about. It is small and mean. Barely worth bothering with. Red treats his assignments here more or less like vacations. But what it lacks in majesty it makes up for in complexity and raw deviousness. In that respect it is ideal.

"I want to go home," says Lizzie. She is wearing a black silk blouse with a bow at the throat.

"This is home now," says Red, as you would to a child. "I saved you. You'll be safe here." He sees his plan in his mind, as it was then - bold and flawless, and as it is now - the foolish lashing-out of a man near ruined.

Lizzie looks up. The New York sky is white, and now silver, and now blazing with vengeful fire. "That's mine," she says, and Red wakes up.

It is morning, the young sun pressing on Red's shutters and curtains with pale insistence. Red sits up and rubs his hand over his hair.

He is not given to dreams. He is not given to sleep. Now that he is so weak, he is vulnerable.

Berlin loves that, of course. The mighty brought low, hilarious.

Red does not want to die. So when Berlin calls him to court and Red goes, a hideous journey on the backs of many charms, and stands sweating with exhaustion in the sparkling fortress and Berlin roars with merriment at Red's diminished state, Red laughs too. And all this jollity almost makes Berlin forget that he still does not know who burned down his house and daughter.

Red knows that that witchhunt is not over. But he hopes the fact that Berlin stole all Red's power makes up for it. Berlin brought it on himself.

With double the power Berlin must be treated carefully. And if Red ever finds a way to steal it back, he will not hesitate.

Red sits up and swings his legs over the edge of the couch. Might as well get up. It is light outside and there is a lot do.

Dembe is stretched out on the hall floor. He often does that when Red falls asleep in the den. Literally guarding the threshold.

Red steps over him saying, "I'll make coffee." This world may lack the strength and majesty of home, but it has many side benefits. Strong coffee is one of them, and Red likes to create, to draw flavour and fragrance from a handful of beans, to distill it into more than a drink, into a glamour cast over the gritty reality of another hard day.

The dream bothers him though. Berlin is coming to this world to work it, claim it, wreck it. Red's patch. He is coming now, which is too much of a coincidence not be suspicious. What does Berlin know?

Red has been looking twenty years and never found the source of Berlin's power, the power ripped from Red's chest during that terrible war. With that power Red could end Berlin, could end all of this, could go home. But Berlin has it still and a battle now will be very uneven.

Red checks the feed from Lizzie's house. She is awake, in a woollen coat and PJs, curled up in a chair on the back porch.

Berlin does not know. She is safe, unknown, which means that Red is also secure. And yet the phone is already in Red's hand, dialling her number.


	8. Chapter 8

The weeks that follow are strange. Everyone's mission intersects and collides with everyone else's until some days Lizzie has to pause and think before answering a question, to work out who knows what and what, therefore, her reply should be.

It has made her a subject of suspicion at the Post Office, especially in the eyes of Donald Ressler, her burdensome colleague and former lead agent in the hunt for Raymond Reddington. He's made it clear that he thinks she is lying about her relationship with Red.

Lizzie doesn't care. It is hard enough knowing what she should think, without worrying about everyone else.

Reddington has become a smiling, tailored fixture in the Post Office and Lizzie's life. When she leaves for work in the mornings, the late summer leaves already pooling around the spindly trees beside her house, Red's limo is at the kerb, growling softly. When she escapes for her lunchtime run, she pounds through the park past fading hydrangeas and roses loaded with hips, her Nikes grinding the gravel and brief freedom puffing her chest, until she turns a corner and sees Reddington in a midnight raincoat and black fedora, lounging on a bench with one polished Oxford on the other knee , reading the energy supplement of the Economist.

And when she looks up from her work at eleven pm, blinking from hours spent focused on her screen, her eyes adjust to the twilight beyond her desk and there is Reddington, waiting with her coat over his arm to take her home.

"You didn't find what you're looking for," he states, holding out her black macintosh. He knows she kisses her husband goodbye every day and then comes in here to try to find out Tom's real identity.

"Neither did you," she counters.

His mouth curls. He told her on their first day that he would never lie to her. But his neither-confirm-nor-deny smirk is infuriating. She has read his file, including his old FBI agent one. She has found many references to his obsession with a twenty year old theft for which there is no evidence whatsoever. He could not even say what had been stolen, only that the best agents in the world must search for it.

Lizzie thinks that this makes him a crazy person, except for his brilliance and efficiency. And here he is once more, bookending her day with a ride home, commiserating with her on the cases which are not going well, celebrating those that have succeeded.

It is like being wooed by a shark. Always swimming, always driven towards its next target, always sleek and graceful and deadly and serene. Always armed.

Yet he can be delicate. She has watched him crack a safe, his fingers caressing the dial, his head tilted to the tumblers in the barrel, his face poised and intent. She has seen him lie in the back of the limo with his eyes closed as the Blue Danube swells to glorious crescendo, his lips parted. And she has seen, as she lay winded by a direct hit to her body armour, how fast he can sprint, dropping her assailant with one shot, and racing to kneel at her side. "Are you hurt?" he asks with an urgency that pierces her, and she looks at him and says, "No," and his dark eyes flicker, relief trembling on his lip, and she knows that no Kevlar could protect her from this, his intensity, and her own strange acquiescence.

* * *

><p>Life at home becomes difficult. As autumn deepens into winter, Tom's injury heals but his bitterness at Lizzie's job increases. "You're never here. How am I supposed to believe in you, in us?"<p>

She looks dumbly at him and Red, watching the playback an hour later in his car, wonders the same thing.

Nothing about this is proving easy. He has spoonfed the FBI the lion's share of his blacklist, practically leading them by the hand to shake down the lairs of kidnappers, poisoners, slave traders, drug lords, warmongers. He has expended his own resources to plant enough clues under their noses that they can hardly fail to bring them in, put them on a wall, make a connection.

It is vital that they discover the charms on their own. Lizzie can figure this out, he knows - but hampered by the rules of her job and her persistent attachment to her husband, she has not yet done so.

Red longs to grab Tom, oblige him to confess to Lizzie that he is a fraud, a highly trained and highly paid actor put in place to maintain intelligence on her whereabouts. But Red has no proof, and someone high up at the FBI is redacting information faster than Red can uncover it.

Red must be patient but it is hard when disaster is arrowing towards them, ready to snatch Lizzie away and put Red forever out of his twenty year misery.

Meanwhile every day is a gift. To see Lizzie at work is miraculous. Her instinct for crime is remarkable. She can sense it through three inches of dense financial papers, through the plush upholstery of a respectable restaurant, through the tearful protestations of apparent victims. When she pushes for a confession, it shoots towards her like a fake nickel to a magnet. No wonder she has risen so far so fast. People cannot resist her.

He admits that _people_, in this case, includes him. Keeping her safe should only be a means to saving his own skin, but it is also such a joy.

* * *

><p>At last the day arrives. Red takes Lizzie, and reluctantly, Ressler, to stake out a diner where Tom's employer will be meeting with the financier of the Mrs Keen surveillance project.<p>

The FBI think this is about rooting out the banker for a government arms theft, so nobody is prepared to see Congressman Alan Fitch sitting in a booth right in the plate glass window, sipping bad coffee and talking business with the blacklister Gina Zanetakos.

It is a dream come true. Ressler bristles with patriotic indignation and Lizzie is turning her eyes to Red in surprise, when a miracle occurs and Tom Keen walks into the diner.

Lizzie gasps.

Red watches her from the corner of his eye. "Are you getting this, Donald," he mutters as Ressler fiddles with the camera.

Tom Keen bends to Zanetakos and kisses her on the mouth, slow and sweet, until Alan taps Tom on the arm. They all sit and chat happily while Ressler snaps away with the zoom lens.

Lizzie pushes their car door and Red grabs her arm. "No!"

She glares at him, wresting free with astonishing strength, but does not get out.

Ressler is calling for backup, for a technical team with sound equipment, for authorisation to apprehend a senior member of government, but all through it Lizzie is mute. As Zanetakos simmeringly hands Tom a bundle of banknotes, Red sees tears on Lizzie's cheek, and murmurs in her ear, "Ressler's got this. Let's get out of here."

* * *

><p>Sitting on the edge of the Victorian bandstand in the park where she runs in her lunchhour, Lizzie ignores the chill of early winter and focuses on not humiliating herself totally in front of Reddington, who has been right all along. Red is beside her, gazing ahead and affecting not to notice that she is a wreck.<p>

With an impulsive motion, Red casts off his glove, takes her hand and holds it in a firm grip. Lizzie stops sobbing instantly, shocked by his touch.

His hand is _dark._ Lizzie looks down at his fingers clasping hers and expects to see charcoal skin, but his hand is the same fair shade as her own, as it has always been. The darkness is in his heart, or hers.

She shivers. Although her father is long dead, a faceless memory, this black touch is him. Fear sweeps her. She sees flames and smells smoke and turns to Red to find him staring at her in turn, his eyes wide, the sky glinting its own blue into them.

Red feels her shudder but he cannot utter the standard facile words of comfort. He is too shaken. Lizzie's hand is hot and is sending bright tendrils skittering up his arm. It is not a static electricity punch from his clothes or hers. It is a force from her flesh, from herself. And it is golden.

The sunlight reaches his armpit and travels into his chest, where it wraps its tentacles around his heart. Red feels a tremendous weight on his chest and opens his mouth to say he is dying but the air in his lungs is all gone.

The park slides sideways in a blur of pale grass and trees like stars, and Red faints.


	9. Chapter 9

Lizzie just catches his head before it hits the bandstand's concrete floor. "Reddington!"

He is grey-skinned and breathing shallowly, but he is breathing. His lips glowed blue for a moment but are regaining their colour. Lizzie loosens his tie and collar with one hand, her phone in the other, dialling 911.

Jesus. A heart attack. Of course, he is old. He smokes. He appears to live off steak and brandy. It makes sense. It's just that she has always thought of him as strong, as tough.

"Red. Can you hear me?"

She drops the phone and checks his collar again, bending over him. "It's ok. Help is coming," she says, just like they taught her on the first aid course. Red has never seemed like someone who would need reassurance.

He moves, reaching for her with his gloved left hand. His fingers entwine with hers. He coughs.

"Don't try to get up," she says. "You've had some sort of heart event."

"No." His voice cracks.

She is crouched awkwardly beside him on the floor. She reaches out to touch his forehead but hesitates. Then she chides herself. Is this his pernicious influence, that she would balk at helping an injured man? She lays her palm on his head. He is hot, his scalp a little damp beneath the short silver hair.

Red opens his eyes. "I'm fine," he says in his usual slow, deep voice.

"You passed out."

"It's nothing."

"I called 911."

He struggles and sits up. "Dear God no. I don't need fuss. I just need a minute and I'll be -"

Lizzie grabs him by the shoulders. "Sit still. You went out like a light and you will be checked out by the medics."

She glares at him.

"That's the look you should give your lying cheating husband when he bitches about you working late," says Red.

"Shut up."

"A real humdinger. That scowl could singe the hair off a man's head. Tell me. Do I still have eyebrows?" He makes a great show of checking and Lizzie is forced to smile.

"That's better," says Red. "And I assure you I am absolutely fine."

She takes his wrist. "Pulse." He resists, with something more than childishness. His pulse is strong and steady. "Huh."

"I told you," says Red. He is breathing through his mouth. His eyes are diamond-bright.

"Quiet."

Lizzie frowns and counts his heartbeats again, miming the numbers. But she is not really concentrating. She is feeling Red's skin, warm, covered in fine fair hair, and now glowing in her mind, bright white.

She is having some kind of breakdown, clearly. She needs to go - not home, somewhere - and get her head together. Reddington is not luminous. She did not give him a heart attack by holding his hand, or - sudden conviction which she tries to quell - cure him by stroking his hair.

She hears ambulance sirens and drops Red's hand.

Nothing happened. Nothing happened, and this is not familiar.

But as she wrestles with impossible ideas, Red gives her a dazzling smile and nods at her. She smells smoke, and sees a midnight sky, and when she has blinked at a sudden strange tearfulness, he is walking away.

* * *

><p>He is playing gin rummy in an abandoned office with Dembe while they wait for the forger in the next room to finish off Whistler's Mother, when Red's phone rings.<p>

Dembe checks it, passes it across. Lizzie's number comes up - as Beachfront B&B.

It's been three weeks. The playback from Lizzie's house has shown her pacing the rooms, yelling and throwing things, slumped on the floor blank-faced, and avoiding the big empty bed upstairs. She leaves the brownstone early in the morning and gets back late. She has thrown herself into the arrest of Congressman Alan Fitch, and then into the internal affairs investigation of how his charges were dropped. She has even gone for after work drink with Ressler. Lizzie is avoiding her house and Red has no idea if she is also avoiding him.

Amidst closing deals, maintaining vigilance pending the arrival of Berlin, and now this sweet forgery opportunity, he has thought long on the consequences of her refusing to know him. He has rattled every link in his chain of contacts. He has hardly slept.

Red takes the phone, nodding Dembe away. "Lizzie."

Her voice is crisp and direct as ever. "I need your help."

"I live for those words. Tell me, was I your first thought, or have you just worked your way through an ever more desperate string of alternatives?" He settles in his chair.

"I got your number from yellow pages. Listen. I need to find out why Tom was paid to surveil me. I want to know what you know. Will you help me?"

"What's in it for me?"

"I don't know. A warm inner glow?"

He chuckles. She is delicious when she is acerbic. "Ah, Lizzie. As it happens there is something you can do for me. Some friends of mine inside the Syrian embassy have asked me to do something a little underhand - " he hears her snort of derision - "and I'm not really comfortable with it. I've promised to meet them at dinner to discuss it but really if you and your colleagues could drop in and pick them up I'd be very grateful."

On the end of the line, Lizzie sighs. "You knew I'd call."

"Yes." He was counting on it, albeit a little anxiously.

"If I do this, will you tell me about - Tom?"

She hesitates. Red hears her other question as clearly as if she had spoken aloud: and tell me what the hell happened in the park last month?

"We'll talk in the restaurant," he says. "You'll love it. The rooftop dining room is actually above the light pollution so you have an uninterrupted view of the stars. It's spectacular, and they thoughtfully provide tiny glowsticks with your silverware so you can see what you're eating."

"Right." She is weary of his effusiveness, but he hears the smile in her voice. "I'll bring my night vision goggles. Send me the details. We'll be there."

"Oh," he adds as she is about to hang up. "Wear something nice. The restaurateurs are _very _ particular about formalwear."


	10. Chapter 10

"There's a link between all these people," Lizzie says. She flings her hand towards the photos stuck on the Blacklist wall. At their centre is a large print of Raymond Reddington in his black suit with the glass buttons.

"Reddington," says Ressler. He chews on a corner of pizza and eyes Lizzie, not the wall.

"No," she says. "Red has an endgame. It involves these people. And - me. But what is it? Why is he bringing these people to us, letting us turn them over? Why these people and why now?"

"He hates them, is all. They're people who double crossed him. Paid him late. Never delivered the illegal arms on time. What's it matter? Reddington's handed us a list of bad guys and ways to bring them in. We might be doing him a favour, but we're making the world a better place. Simple."

Lizzie turns to him. "I envy you," she says. "I can't take this at face value. I know there's something more." She cannot explain about the incident in the park.

"There probably is," Ressler agrees, crumpling his pizza box and tossing it in the trash. "But that's not our mission."

"No."

Ressler is so uncomplicated. She should probably take the comfort he is blatantly offering. She misses sharing a bed, not especially the sex, more the intimacy, the warmth of snuggling under the covers with someone who could rub your icy feet and hold you tight after a tough day. Ressler is a snuggler, she just knows it. He'd be up for cosy nights in, bringing her coffee in the morning, those pleasant things which go when a marriage goes.

But Ressler. She likes him. But she doesn't want to get involved. She is still raw about Tom. No, Donald will have to soldier on with his crush and no encouragement from her.

"Ah, Lizzie. There you are. We'll be leaving in fifteen minutes."

Lizzie sends her gaze to the door. Red wears a sharp-cut suit the colour of adultery, with a scarlet tie and a flash of cream silk in his top pocket. He holds his hat in his hand and is beckoning her with it.

"I'm not changed," says Lizzie. She does not add, and I am still in last night's clothes because I haven't slept, but she suspects Red knows that. She has a bone to pick with him later about a certain tiny camera she found when she was ripping all evidence of Tom out of her house.

Reddington shucks his shirt cuff and looks ostentatiously at his watch.

Lizzie grabs a plastic dry cleaners' bag from under her desk. "All right, all right."

Red perches himself on her desk once she's gone, his trench in the crook of his arm, his hat held on his knee. There are piles of paper on the desk and Red picks at them, his mouth lazy, his eyes alert.

"That's not yours," says Ressler.

"Oh Donald, Donald. I've forgiven you for dogging my every move for five years. Why can't you get past it? You need to move on." Red smiles dangerously.

"Maybe I have," says Ressler.

Red stops smiling. "Agent Keen is a married woman."

"Doesn't look that way from where I'm standing. -And that's not what I meant."

"Hmmn. "

The two men glare at each other and then the elevator doors open and Lizzie walks back in. Her eyes are directed to Red and her expression is set and hard. She is unimpressed with the mission, with being his date, with knowing him at all.

And yet -

She wears red, a simple dress of pleated silk, with black showing between the scarlet folds. The hem reaches her calves and the neckline skims her collarbone. She has a fine silver chain at her throat, no pendant. Her purse is black velvet and large enough to conceal her sidearm. Her shoes are black velvet too, and if Red is not mistaken - he rarely is - her tiny earrings are diamonds.

Her hair is piled onto her crown in soft whorls, a tendril falling clear either side.

Red stares in a way he should have grown out of aged fourteen, and actually stands up to greet her. "Lizzie," he says, and it does not come out quite as smoothly as he intended.

Ressler's eyes are on stalks.

Red crosses the Post Office floor to Lizzie, pulling on his gloves. "It's freezing out there. Take my coat." He drapes it around her shoulders, and Ressler narrows his eyes. Red pays him no attention. To Lizzie her murmurs, "You look absolutely appropriate."

She looks up at this typical backhanded compliment, her eyes very blue under the Post Office's fluorescent glare, and asks quietly, "Are you OK?" She is scanning his face, his hair, his mouth.

"Never better," says Red with exaggerated heartiness, and hustles her into the elevator. As they descend Red sees Ressler roll his eyes.

At the end of their journey there is another elevator ride, to a chilly rooftop where diners sit under the open sky, warmed by heaters and lit only, as Red had promised, by blue and green chemical glow sticks. It is a little like being underwater, in a black ocean where the only creatures are those that carry their own illumination. Lizzie has a moment of vertigo, because they are sixty floors up but the sensation is of being at the bottom of an alien sea.

Red catches her elbow as she falters, and guides her to the table. "This is us. I trust your colleagues are in position. Here, sit down and gaze plausibly into my eyes."

He smirks at her and she looks daggers at him. "We are not playing house," she hisses.

He adjusts her chair. Sitting himself, he pours her wine, which she ignores. "Oh do try it. It's older than you and deserves a little respect."

She lifts the glass but does not sip. "Where's your contact," she says, all business.

"Let's eat," says Red, signalling the waiter. "The lobster, Antonio, and don't skimp. I want the daddy of the tank, the one with the muscles of years of fighting his way to the top."

Lizzie frowns. "We don't have time for this."

"On the contrary. Unless we eat, all the people watching us will know this is a setup and my Syrian friends won't show. So enjoy the best lobster thermidor in the eastern seaboard and wait for my cue."

She sighs. Food arrives. The smell is gorgeous. She cannot resist and he knows it. They eat, and she gives him a smile of resentment mingled with involuntary gratitude. "Strange how my assignments with you always involve dinner and drinks."

"And Ressler's always left crouching in the back alley with the trash cans," he agrees. "Yet we must all do what we must. Hold my hand."

"No."

"The maitre'd works for the Syrians and he knows who I am. Hold my hand."

She looks down at his gloved fingers, then back up to meet his gaze. The force of her will buffets Red like the heat escaping from a New York bakery when the door is opened onto the wintry street. Lizzie blinks at him.

Red peels off his gloves.

Lizzie extends her left wrist across the tablecloth and Red wraps his right hand around her left. After a second her fingers squeeze his.

He is steel grey today, not the coal black he was the first time he held her hand. Now Lizzie watches his face as their skin makes contact, and she sees, or thinks she sees, a little tremor pass through him, a tiny thrill, like a frisson of attraction. His eyelashes flicker and his smile drops, loses its conviction, is pleased to be taken by surprise.

Lizzie looks down at her fingers around his wrist, restraining him, holding him against the starched white tablecloth. His glow is paling, steel turning to platinum. And for the first time she senses her own energy, brilliant orange, covering his hand.

A long time passes and neither of them says anything.

She cracks first. "You know what this is," she accuses.

"So do you." Red notices that she has not let go. The first flare of her touch has faded and now there is only her warmth, her soft palm on his wrist.

"Tell me."

"We knew each other," he says. The admission comes from a deep place in him, in the wreck of his chest. "A long time ago. You don't remember me."

"I don't remember anything before the fire that killed my parents," she says. "I was four."

Red tilts his head to one side and says nothing.

"So I knew you before the fire," she says, silently calculating. Wow. Of course, he would already have been an adult then. But she doesn't remember him at all. "You knew - my parents."

He waits. Her hand on his arm is something new and he has always enjoyed the new. There are still very fine tendrils swarming over him, attacking his heart and lungs, but he's damned if he's going to cough now.

"You knew me." She is trying to puzzle it out. "Why would you know me?"

That is a tricky question and one for another time. "I always knew you would be exceptional," he says, "but I never expected you to be so beautiful. You must have your mother's looks. You certainly don't have your father's."

He gives the nod to Antonio. The Syrian contact appears, a man with a goatee and heavy brows. Before Red can speak the man strides to their table and points a small semi automatic at Red and Liz.

"Ah," says Red with a catlike smile. "There you are."


	11. Chapter 11

The tranquil rooftop scene disintegrates as diners kick back chairs and draw weapons. Waiting staff dive for the floor or hustle for the exit.

"Good evening, Adad." Red stands, buttoning his coat. "Do you have what we agreed?"

All around, staff and apparent diners are engaged in miniature Mexican standoffs, faces distorted in the eerie blue and green light. Lizzie sees Dembe in a black suit facing down two men dressed as waiters. Liz reaches for her own weapon but Red's fingers close around her wrist and she stops.

"Do you have what I want?" demands the Syrian.

"Of course." Red gestures with his free hand at the scene. "Was all this really necessary? I was hoping for a quiet dinner with my accountant and instead you've brought Uncle Tom Cobley and all."

"The FBI are outside," says Adad.

"If they are then perhaps your Embassy colleagues are not as careful as you thought. Think about it, Adad, why would I want the FBI to witness our transaction?"

Adad turns to Lizzie. "Who's she?"

"My accountant, Adad, were you not listening? Really I'm starting to doubt you have the capabilities necessary to manage what I'm about to give you." Red shakes his head in great disappointment.

"No. I want it. But I want a little insurance along with it." He directs his weapon at Lizzie.

"No," says Red, but Lizzie slips from his grasp and takes a step towards Adad. Adad grips her arm, his expression revolted. He clamps her like someone obliged to clutch an eel.

"Make the exchange," Lizzie says to Adad. "Mr Reddington will honour his side of the deal. You know he will. "

She holds out her hand - hoping that the exchange is something that can be passed to her and that she is not making a total ass of herself - but Adad presses the muzzle of his gun to her head. "She's wearing a wire," he says. "She's FBI."

"For pity's sake don't be ridiculous," says Red. "Do you think I don't know my own staff? What do you take me for?" He picks up his napkin and wipes his mouth with it. "Now what do you have for me," he says, the napkin still dangling from his fingers.

"The locations of Chinese agents in the United States," says Adad.

Lizzie keeps her face impassive. Her heart beats rapidly. This intel alone justifies the operation.

"I'm afraid that's insufficient," says Red. "What do you have on Berlin?"

Lizzie concentrates on not showing surprise. Berlin. Ressler tailed Red there once. But what have the Germans got to do with anything?

"Stop wriggling," says Adad, and casually hits Lizzie across the face. "Nothing," he tells Red. "The Chinese have no word on Berlin. Now where is your part of the deal?" Adad says, tightening his hold on Lizzie.

Red flicks the napkin at Adad. "I assume all these people here are yours?"

Adad nods.

"As I thought. The service tonight was terrible."

Red stares at Lizzie, then says, "Well. Let's do this."

He casts the napkin into Adad's face, Lizzie twists round and disarms him, and Red pulls out a pistol and jams it into Adad's gut.

On cue, Ressler and his team burst from the kitchen and overwhelm the rooftop. In moments, their leader held hostage, Adad's people are vanquished.

Red leans over Adad as Lizzie is cable-tying his wrists. He holds his hand up to Adad's face and speaks softly. Lizzie catches a glint of gold in Red's palm. Adad glowers at him, and then closes his eyes. Red steps back, offering his arm to Lizzie. "Shall we?"

"Did you get all that," Lizzie says to Ressler, tearing the wire from her bodice.

Ressler takes a sheet of paper from Adad's pocket. "Heard every word," he says to Lizzie. "We're done here." He averts his eyes as she refastens her dress. "Good job, Keen."

Lizzie shrugs and cautiously touches her cheek where Adad smacked her.

"I have ice in the car," says Red. His gloved hand is in the small of Lizzie's back. "Let's get you down there."

He draws Lizzie towards the elevator, and Ressler, scowling, watches them go.

* * *

><p>Lizzie climbs into Red's car. "You didn't need me for that at all," she says.<p>

"Not so," says Red. "I have been surrounded by plug ugly men all day - no offence, Dembe - and needed an evening in the presence of beauty. And you have been staying up late every night, torn between hoping and fearing that your former supposed husband will come back, and needed a decent dinner. The evening has been mutually beneficial."

She huffs at that, but when his car stops outside her house, she turns to him and reaches out her hand.

Red is not sure where the gesture was intended to go - his shoulder? His cheek? But in any case he catches her hand and puts it to his lips. "Goodnight."

"Goodnight," she returns.

They are both, he realises, staring at her hand in his. Red's skin tingles like coming indoors after collecting the post on a Minnesota morning in February. It is a long time and worlds away that he has known that particular sensation. But of course, this is her, and it does make sense.

He wants that tingle against his mouth again, but Lizzie slides her hand free.

The door closes and Red lies flat across the back seat of the limo.

"I am in love," he says.

Dembe says nothing. It is not his job to comment. Also Red says a lot of things in the car and many of them are completely fatuous.

Dembe has many times heard Red say that their only job is to protect Elizabeth Keen, and the rest will follow. Perhaps love fits with this agenda, perhaps not. Dembe does not speculate.

Red looks at the cream coloured ceiling and imagines kissing Lizzie in a very non protective way indeed. And then he imagines her outrage and immediate armlock, overpowering him with ease, demanding an explanation.

"Even better," he says out loud with a chuckle.

The bedroom light goes on in Lizzie's house and the limo pulls away.


	12. Chapter 12

Lizzie strolls the boardwalk at Coney Island, her hands tucked in her coat pockets, the hood of her sweatshirt pulled up to shield her from the biting wind coming straight off the Atlantic. Weather is meant to travel the other way, from here to Europe, where it batters the shores of Ireland and Cornwall and Brittany, but today the wind is battering the shores of south Brooklyn with fierce determination, and Lizzie, and the few others venturing out, are muffled to their eyes.

_Some _visitors of course, will materialise in a climate controlled limousine and step out as if onto the deck of a million dollar yacht, glancing idly round through their gold rimmed sunglasses like butter wouldn't melt. _Some _people have been jetting to tropical South China, claiming urgent business in Macau.

Lizzie turns into the funfair where the silent rides offer some shelter from the gale. She has missed Red. He's been gone a week and even though she can check his tracker on her phone, the green dot blinking across the international map cannot replace his charismatic presence. Lizzie has felt his absence like an ache, a soreness in her chest which intensifies when she thinks of him. It feels physical, as if a part of her is stretching out toward Red, seeking him, wherever he is now.

She has drunk a fair amount of Pinot this week just trying to dull that ache.

She would think it was a psychological thing, some reaction to the collapse of her marriage - perfectly understandable, to feel drawn to this man, who is strong and comforting and powerful and not bad looking and rich and who swears he acts only in her best interests - except for what happened in the park, what happened on that starlight rooftop. Those things, those sparks are not part of any attraction she might have, not that she does have any, to Red. Maybe she is completely crazy. But it certainly seemed like she has a literal electricity with Red, and that he knows it, and it is connected to her past.

Lizzie wanders past machines encrusted with coloured lightbulbs and airbrushed with poor likenesses of celebrities. The rides loom up either side of her, pink and glitter-painted automatons under the watery winter sun. Lizzie's boots strike hollow notes on the old wooden deck.

She is early. Dembe said they would be there at two, and it is fifteen minutes before then. She is embarrassed by her own eagerness. -It is because she wants answers.

As if she can expect anything but evasion from him. And yet, when he looks at her, she imagines she can see compassion in his eyes. A man with compassion cannot be the monster she has been reading about in the old FBI files. Can he?

She grimaces. Is this whole thing just a projection of her own loneliness and failure, feelings amplified by the sad fairground machines all around?

She stands still, and the footsteps which have been keeping time with her own stop just a second too late.

She whirls round, hand on her gun, but her pursuer has dodged between a Waltzer and a Pirate Ship. She sprints down the echoing aisles, gun drawn, but finds no one. And as she turns a corner and finds herself back where she began, there is Red, patient in a cream suit and Panama hat, folding up his shades and looking nothing like November.

"Red!" She tries to maintain dignity but her approach is less cool Federal agent, more horror movie teen. "Someone was here -"

Dembe appears, his hand at his hip.

"Walk with me," commands Red. "Let's look at the ocean."

They march towards the waterfront and Lizzie is aware of Dembe behind them, surveying, guarding.

Lizzie opens her mouth to tell Red she wants to know what is going on, but he gets there first.

"I want you to have this." He slides his hand into his jacket - no gloves today, although of course he has just stepped off a plane from the Southern Hemisphere - and draws out a small wooden box. Before she has touched it, before she has taken in that the fine gilding on the lid is stars and moons, Lizzie knows that what is inside is incredibly valuable.

Red leads her to the railing. They face the roiling sea and he puts the box into her hands. His mouth twitches a bit, as if he finds this distasteful or boring, but she sees him from the corner of her eye, intent on her as she opens the box.

Inside is a golden key, a beautifully wrought thing like a queen's filigree birdcage. It is two inches long, and on a chain. She picks it up and gets a sense of it being brand new, the hands of its makers still warming the metal - and old, so ancient that nobody still living could have created it.

"I used to have one just like it," she says. She had forgotten all about that. It got stolen when she switched foster parents one time.

"Yes."

She puts the chain around her neck. The key chills her skin for a moment and then warms. It is heavy, heavier than it seemed in her palm. "It's a tracker, isn't it."

"Not entirely. But I have been meeting with a very old acquaintance and he has left me in no doubt that you need more protection. This key - will help keep you safe."

He gestures to it, now unseen inside her hoodie.

Lizzie immediately knows he too is thinking of her holding his hand. His eyes have tired shadows, but burn with his customary dark energy.

"I have to go now," says Red. "Berlin is watching me too. His people must not see us together."

"Who's Berlin?"

"A very dangerous person." Red turns and nods to Dembe, who is standing, tensed, a short way off. "I have to go," he repeats. He doesn't move.

They have spent less than three minutes together. Now he is going to vanish again and she will have this key and the green dot and still no answers.

"Goodbye, Lizzie " says Red with his typical deliberate intonation.

Behind him the sea hurls itself against the breakwater, hammering again and again with its message of destruction and inevitability. Water seems tame, a thing to pour into a glass or fill a bath, but it can turn mountains into grains of sand. The tide does what it must, drawn by forces beyond this planet, and whilst it is feared and admired, it cannot have friends.

Red is gazing at her with that isolation reflected in his eyes. Whether it is the otherworldly magnetism between them, or her own compassion and longing, Lizzie can't say, but whatever the reason she has to act - and she steps to him and kisses his cheek.

The bloom of brightness is instantly there in her mind. His cheek is rough with half a day's growth after an old fashioned razor, but he is no longer black inside. In the second of contact Lizzie closes her eyes and sees Red in silver, brushed steel, fine crystal. The blackness has withered. She pulls away and knows that she is doing this, is irradiating him.

His eyes are wide as she draws back. There is lip gloss on his cheek, a red smudge next to his mouth. She has never seen him so startled.

Dembe says, "We need to move now."

Red grabs Lizzie's arm and they all run for the car as Dembe's radio crackles with warnings from Red's network of protection, and steely rain falls in daggers from the sky.

* * *

><p><strong>Author's note: <strong>This is a version of the scene in Indifferent Sea which inspired this whole fic. This is in winter, not summer, and from Liz's point of view and so seems very different to the other scene...who knows which version is closer to the truth? -Let me know what you think. -Sef


	13. Chapter 13

Years ago, Red would have known Dembe was in the room without opening his eyes. He could have sent his senses out to the kitchen, or the street, and found Dembe checking the fridge for milk, or incapacitating intruders, and he would have sent help, overcome resistance and had messages flying back to the homeworld, all without properly waking up.

Nowadays things do not run so smoothly. The level of planning and care he must take each day just to manage Berlin's charm production, monitor Lizzie, look for his stolen power and stay safe, is exhausting. So when Dembe's hand lands on Red's shoulder, Red clambers up through layers of inadequate rest, opens his eyes and says, "What time is it?"

"Four. The plane is ready." Dembe hands Red a mug of coffee.

Red grimaces, sits upright on the couch and begins the process of flexing his limbs. Age is not a consideration in this job, but he wishes he could spring up after no sleep the way he could as a boy.

"Agent Keen is leading a team into the old mill at dusk," Dembe says.

Red gulps down coffee. While the FBI are rummaging through antique grindstones, he will be reaching out with what little remains of his ability, to sense power. If Berlin has been using this blacklister, not even to hold the power, but perhaps just to move it around, then Red will know.

-In theory. Red assumes he will recognise his own stuff. He assumes that an excised power does not just adopt its new host happily. He does not _know._ Berlin committed a crime not seen in a thousand years, and Red is no historian. He is operating on increasingly fragile beliefs.

Red sets down the coffee cup and feels in his pocket for his cigar case. The earth habit does your lungs no good, but its toxins are so complex and addictive that they numb the hole in his chest. He lights up, alternates caffeine and nicotine and tries to think.

Berlin has actually arrived in this world, which has been Red's home and hideaway for so long. The other lieutenants, almost all of whom form Red's blacklist, will be scrambling to demonstrate loyalty. The empire of crime built on the golden charms from Macau is preparing for takeover and everyone wants a slice of the pie. Everyone except Red. Red is heartily sick of the pie and also afraid of how helpless he is, should Berlin find Lizzie here. Berlin will kill him, of course, but what would happen to Lizzie? Soon, he knows, he will find out.

Berlin is nearer today than yesterday. Red feels it like a coin sinking to the bottom of the glass. There is an old, old expression they have here. _Take the shilling._ Recruiters for the navy and army would drop a coin into your beer. When you finished your drink, and saw the coin at the end, you were enlisted, because you had taken the kings shilling.

That is the approach of Berlin. A base metal disc dropping to the bottom of a tankard on a day when you just wanted a drink but they wanted you for cannon fodder...

"Raymond," says Dembe. "You will find it. You are certain Berlin does not have it?"

"If he had it," says Red, "worlds would have been torn apart when his house burned. We all would have suffered."

"I think you all did suffer," says Dembe.

Red winces. "Berlin could not have resisted using his power if he had it. It's what I would do. You buy a Ferrari, you don't put it in the garage and lock the door. You grab your hat and head to the mountain roads. I think Berlin stashed my power, got double crossed, and lost it. Now he's found it, here in this world, and he's coming to collect."

"What makes you sure this is the world?"

Red drains the coffee cup. He reaches for his tie and begins winding it around his neck. "Because this is where Berlin sends the people he wants to torture. He likes having us here, trapped like moths under a jar in an aviary. Eventually one of the moths will panic and knock the jar over. And when that happens the blackbird will swoop down and open up his jaws."

* * *

><p>The golden key is warm and heavy inside her blouse. Lizzie has her phone in one hand and her car keys in the other - standard configuration - as she gathers with the rest of the team in the Post Office's conference room.<p>

Cooper is at the head of the table. "I've got an update for you," he says. "This is for this team only and is not to go outside these walls." He looks meaningfully at Lizzie while he says this.

Everyone waits, glancing around. Ressler fiddles with his phone. Lizzie puts hers down and fights the impulse to touch the key which hangs at her throat. She has not taken it off since Red gave it to her - sentiment perhaps, although that does not encompass all that she feels about him. The shape and texture of the metal key are irresistible, and when it rests on her skin, it calms her.

Cooper fixes Lizzie with stern eyes and says, "We're cutting Reddington off."

Everyone reacts. Ressler frowns, Meera exclaims and Aram looks at Lizzie.

'We're in the middle of a Blacklist case," says Lizzie calmly. Her hand is around the key.

"Even so. When we pull this one in, that's the end. We're allowing a career criminal and traitor to direct our work. That ends here." Cooper narrows his eyes. "I've never liked the strong impression I have that Reddington is using us, and I'm no longer prepared to pander to him."

"He has handed us some major coups," says Lizzie.

"He's playing us," says Cooper. "Ressler drew to my attention the details from Reddington's old files. The man was fixated on finding some missing power supply."

Lizzie turns to Ressler. This, after Ressler affected not to be interested in the whys of Red's Blacklist. Ressler shrugs.

Cooper goes on, "Reddington is looking for something and applying FBI resources to find it. Well, I'm cutting him off before he does because I think it's safe to assume that when he finds whatever it is, he'll be gone."

Lizzie clutches the key. "I think we should ask Reddington," she says. "Ask him outright what he's looking for."

"He won't tell us," says Ressler scornfully.

"We can't just leave him out in the cold," protests Lizzie

She is thinking of Berlin, and Red's face when he gave her this key. Red is worried. Scared even. He mustn't be cast off now.

She stares Cooper down, willing him to stop this course of action, and amazingly it works.

"All right," says Cooper. He shakes his head as if a fly just buzzed him. "Finish the case. Well review our ongoing relationship with Mr Reddington afterwards. Get it done."

They are dismissed.

Lizzie feels the key hot in her hand. When she unfurled her fingers, it has left a mark on her palm, an exact imprint of its filigree work. As she watches, the key cools off and the mark fades until there is nothing to see.

* * *

><p>The phone rings as Red's jet passes over Connecticut, making its slow descent into today's discreet private airfield.<p>

Red sees 'Waterfront B and B' and rejects the call.

He takes off his glasses and rubs the bridge of his nose. The jet is useful but small. It does not have the reach of a jumbo and he has had to make a stop on the way back from Macau. Sometimes it would be nice to be able to travel on a regular passenger airline. Or - involuntary thought he suppresses too late - to be able to traverse worlds the old way. He twitches in irritation.

After a minute or two, he calls from his other phone. "Lizzie. "

She pocks up immediately."We need to talk."

"And there was I longing for an evening with my cats and Dancing with the Stars. Where shall we meet?"

"You won't get the chance. You might never see me again."

That gets his attention. "What is it?"

"Is this line secure?"

Her voice is tense and urgent. As flattering as it would be to imagine that this is the result of eagerness to see him, Red recognises bad news when he hears it. "What's wrong?"

"I've stalled them for the moment but-"

"Lizzie. Just tell me, Lizzie."

"Red, they want to cut you off. Make you a fugitive again."

Relief crashes over him. "Is that all? Frankly it would be a weight off my mind not to have to ptetend that Harold Cooper is anything but an ineffectual irritation, like a bad dandruff shampoo."

"They want to abandon the Blacklist altogether," Lizzie says.

That's a different story. Even on the run Red knows he can count on Lizzie to update him on their success in the cases. But to stop working on the Blacklist -

As if mourning itself, the hole in his chest squeezes him, making him cough.

"Are you ok?" Lizzie asks.

He ignores that. "Cooper is making a mistake."

"You're searching for something," she says. "What?"

He pictures her earnest face. He always knew she would work that out. "Something stolen a long time ago. Stolen from me," he adds.

"What? I read your file. You've been obsessed for twenty years. What are you looking for?" He doesn't answer. "Is it me?" she asks. "What am I to you? Why did you choose me?"

"I can't talk now," he says. "But the truth is coming. I promise you that." He ends the call.

Dembe passes him a drink. Red leans back in his seat and contemplates how to tell someone you kidnapped them, took away their life and their heritage, put them in danger, and have been using them for months in the hopes of ensuring they can never go home?

He sighs as the plane comes in to land. He knows he has to warn Lizzie. She will need some defence against Berlin when inevitably he comes looking for his power and finds her instead. But it is hard. Red has been putting this off since the day he met Agent Elizabeth Keen. Because once she knows the truth, he will certainly lose her.

* * *

><p>The bust goes south immediately. Red lurks with Dembe in the woods close to the old mill, and listens to gunfire. "We should leave," says Dembe, but Red shakes his head. Dembe goes, tight-mouthed, to get the car running.<p>

Which is why Dembe is not there when Red, watching through binoculars as federal agents crash backwards out of the mill with guns firing and shots chasing them into the yard, begins to cough.

He coughs all the time, of course. As a lifelong smoker it generally takes half an hour for his throat to acclimate in the mornings. And since he lost his power, the hole in his chest plays up something chronic.

This is different. The cough is like a fit, like an animal in its last seizures before death. Red drops to one knee, smashing his chest with the flat of one hand and clutching a willow trunk for support with the other.

He can't stop. Hack, back, hack. He is going to keel over if he can't take a normal breath soon. He crouches, hands on knees, sucking in air and retching up coughs in great bellows.

The old ache returns and sticks him harder than ever. In his youth he could resist this, the touch of power, but now he has nothing to fight back with. All the same he tries, and as he does, his starving brain registers between heaves that the man in the doorway of the old mill is tall, with stooping shoulders and a blue coat draped from them like the wings of a great bloody-beaked vulture. His high forehead and piercing black eyes only heighten this impression, and Red can see that he shimmers with power.

Red jolts to silence and tries to think, to act but the sight of this man, here, has frozen his wits. Because this is not the blacklister Lizzie is expecting, but Berlin.


	14. Chapter 14

Red is caught. To ignore Berlin's call would be a declaration of war. But to go to him now might draw out Lizzie. She would reckon, correctly, that Red is in danger, and spring forward to defend him. It's who she is.

Berlin would see her, and anyone seeing Red next to Lizzie would know she was special to him. Worse, Berlin would probably recognise Lizzie.

If Red had found his power -

But he has not.

The cough will not let go of him. It seems like ten minutes have passed. But it is only a few seconds.

He has to answer Berlin. Not to will arouse suspicion.

Red feels in his pocket for a charm, the twin of the one he gave Lizzie, and summons what vestiges of power he has left. He is steeling himself to send a plausibly loyal answer to Berlin's call, when on the other side of the yard, opposite Red, Lizzie herself stands up from her hiding place and aims her weapon at Berlin's head.

Red's cough ceases as Berlin's attention is drawn away. Fire, Red thinks. Fire and then run.

But Lizzie stands motionless, staring past Berlin into the mill's dark doorway. Red squints into the gloom and sees Tom.

Dammit. Nothing is ever simple.

Berlin is stalking across the yard. He is fixed on Lizzie and he is frowning. Red can tell that Berlin is sending feelers to Lizzie, suspicious, wanting confirmation from her.

-Which he must not get. If Berlin finds her here on Red's patch, he will know the whole truth at once.

Red stands up, brushing off his trousers, and strolls without hesitation towards the mill. He pulls out his phone and calls Dembe. "We have a situation. Berlin's here. Get the girl." Then he tosses the phone aside and pulls out his Colt.

"Berlin!" he yells as Berlin takes another step towards Lizzie.

Lizzie turns and sees him. Berlin flashes round too, and the rage on his face tells Red he is too late. Berlin knows.

Berlin raises his hand to Lizzie.

"No!" Red fires, and misses.

Berlin produces an old earth shotgun from nowhere and aims it very loosely at Red. Berlin's eyes are black. His hair, iron grey, has thinned over the years, and his grip on the gun is careless.

Red understands. Shot scatters, doing not necessarily lethal damage, but the most damage, when the gut, say, rather than the head or heart, is the target. Red stands still. Nowhere to run to. Better to let Berlin take the shot and give Lizzie a chance to drop him while he is distracted by Red.

Lizzie screams and fires too. Her shot goes high, or Berlin deflects it. "FBI!" Lizzie yells but then Berlin pulls the trigger.

Red is lifted from his feet and thrown sideways, which is odd. He lies winded, waiting for the pain to follow the shock, but nothing comes bar the tenderness of being bruised by strong magic. Lizzie shrieks and fires again and again at Berlin. After three rounds, Berlin whirls, coat tails flying, dodges Lizzie's bullet and disappears.

Red curses, struggles to his knees and reloads. Berlin has gone. But at least Lizzie is safe. Red is about to take out Tom when he sees Tom with a weapon already trained on him.

Tom is sneering and Lizzie is shrieking at Tom and Red can't do a thing about it as Tom snorts and pulls the trigger.

* * *

><p>The bullet goes past him, so close it is an explosion. Nothing like a dart whistling past. Modern bullets don't graze your arm or make a hilarious hole in your hat. They flatten you with the impact alone, and being narrowly missed by a bullet feels a lot like like being hit by one.<p>

Red crashes to the ground again. After a while he feels cold damp earth on his face. He is alive, then.

Lizzie is close by. Red can feel the void in his chest pulsing. He used to think it was sexual attraction, making his heart beat faster when she was near. Or love. But it is nothing so romantic. She has power, terribly strong power, and he has a void to fill.

Lizzie's shot booms out and then she is beside him, a burst of urgency herself, dragging at his sleeve. "Red! Talk to me. Can you hear me?"

"Perfectly well. And now help me up, would you. We should probably flee."

She grabs his hand and hauls him to his feet. He gasps in pain and then gains strength, as always, from her touch. No wonder Berlin stopped dead. Lizzie, even unknowing, is extremely strong.

Red scrambles up and they run, crouched, for the trees.

Under the leafy canopy they stop, and Lizzie starts to phone in. Red stops her with a hand on her arm. "Your colleagues can handle it. He'll be listening for signals." And pursuing them, though Red wants to get his breath back before thinking about that.

Her gaze has zoomed in on his hand. "You're hurt."

He has not noticed that he is bleeding. It is tree related, not bullet related. "It's a scratch." But it is so pleasant to have her fingertips on his skin that he does not protest further.

She checks him over, running her hands over his arms, shoulders, chest. "You should have run," she said. "I gave you a chance." She does not mention how she gave it, that massive shove out of Berlin's line of fire.

"I couldn't leave you."

"Why?"

For this. To feel care radiating through her hands, to see it in her eyes as she takes a handkerchief out of her coat pocket and binds it around his hand. "Habit," he says. "Come on. We should move."

* * *

><p>The trees smother sound so that in ten minutes Lizzie can hear only birds, crying alarm to each other high in the canopy, and the noise of her own progress. Red follows her, treading the path she has made.<p>

"What's the plan," she mutters.

"Find Dembe."

"We should get back to my team -"

"Your team is most likely dead."

She imagines this. No. It is impossible. Ressler dived into the barn before Berlin appeared. Meera never left cover. Lizzie herself took Tom down and Berlin, if that's who he was, is gone.

She feels the key hot against her skin. She needs to ask Red about it, and what happened back there, but can't. Not yet. She feels numb. And weirdly light, like getting up after a week in bed with flu eating nothing but thin soup. Empty.

Her phone buzzes in her pocket. Dembe. She thumbs the Answer button.

Is he there?" says Dembe.

"Yes."

"Go to the road north. I will intersect with you in fifteen minutes." The line goes dead.

"Throw away your phone," says Red. and when she hesitates, he takes it from her hand , grinds it with his heel and then casts it, overarm, far into the trees.

They reach the road. No sign of Dembe and Lizzie is reluctant to walk along in view of any other vehicle. Pursuit is coming - she knows it, feels it - but it is not here yet. They flop down under some dense shrubs to wait and Lizzie wraps her arms around her knees, simultaneous defence and consolation.

She takes in Red's appearance. He is wearing black combat pants, tough black boots and a navy sweat shirt with a hood, the round neck of a black t shirt showing under the sweats. She thinks it is the first time she has seen him out of his trademark tailoring. Despite the silver in his hair, he looks strangely young and soft in such unstructured clothes. Yet his dark eyes and compressed mouth show he is as alert and as deadly as ever.

And so, it seems, is she. She threw a grown man into a bush without touching him. She smiles.

"Something funny, Agent Keen?" He is sprawled in the dirt on one elbow, as comfortable here as in his suite at the Four Seasons.

She shakes her head, her eyes trailing back to his neck, naked without its collar and tie.

"I notice you're not in your usual finery either. What's this, joggers? Dear God." He reaches out and flicks at the ankle of her pants. As his hand brushes her ankle, a spark passes between them. Lizzie is not sure which way it went - from him to her or, as she increasingly accepts, from her to him? This is not just a frisson of attraction or tension. This is not just falling in love. This is something deeper, some connection rooted inside them, something recognised.

Something that she can call on, like swiping Berlin, in times of needs. Red knows what it is. He feels it too.

On an impulse she reaches for Red's hand. He raises his eyebrows but clasps her fingers quite willingly.

This time she concentrates and actively tries to push the spark - that is how she thinks of it, a bright burst of fire as from a foundry - from herself, toward him. She grasps it, fire in her heart, flames flickering faster as she focuses, and then racing down her arm to her hand and across the interface of her skin to his.

This time he jolts, grips her hand so hard she squeaks, and then a judder passes through him. She tries to pull away, afraid she has hurt him - again - but he hangs onto her. When she dares to meet his gaze he is smiling, lips parted, in wonder.

"I'm so sorry -"

"Oh my god," he says, cutting right across her as usual. He blinks at her. He seems to be blinking away tears. "Lizzie. It's you." He frees his hand and clamps it across his mouth, shaking his head. "All this time. I never imagined -"

He leans across and takes her face in his hands, kisses her on the mouth, then holds her away, shaking his head, laughing.

After a while he lets her go and puts one hand in his hair, tugging as if to drag in belief and his eyes are wild. Lizzie sits, his kiss still tingling on her lips in a bright bloom, sunrise on a mountain, and knows that Red has found what he has been seeking for twenty years.

A black car with Dembe at the wheel draws up beside them and they hustle in. Lizzie turns to Red to ask - everything - but his face has gone tense and closed, his mouth is tight and his eyes are the inky blue of a troubled sea.


	15. Chapter 15

The car travels a long way, and fast, before Lizzie realises they are not headed for the airport.

"We can't fly," Red says. "If Berlin finds us he will drop us out of the sky. And I always hoped I'd die aged ninety, replete with fine food and drink, in the arms of a beautiful woman after hours of the most fantastic lovemaking of our lives."

Lizzie rolls her eyes, but only a little, because for Red this scenario is somewhat believable. "So where do we go?"

"Nowhere. For now, we'll keep moving. And hope to find somewhere to stop for - long enough."

He is facing towards his window, in part profile to her. For a man who can lie whilst gazing into your eyes, he seems remarkably concerned that she shouldn't see his face. He is hiding again, denying her answers, refusing her the truth. And after everything that's happened, everything that's passed between them, this evasion pisses her off.

She hardens her voice. "Now is the time," she says. "Now is when you tell me what is going on, who you are and what the hell just happened back there. The key."

Red glances at Dembe in the rear view mirror. "Take us to the safe house. The first one."

Dembe gives a small nod.

Red settles in his seat. "Let me tell you -"

"Stop," says Lizzie. "I'll do the asking." She glares at him.

"The answers won't make sense in isolation," says Red in his unruffled way.

"I'm a big girl. I can put the pieces together."

"I have no doubt. But for all of our safety you should let me tell this my way." He nods his head. Encouragement.

She thinks about it, then spends a few more seconds pretending to. Now Red has the start of a smile, and that finishes her. She smacks the leather seat. "No. For once you do not get to dictate the pace. You do not get to drip-feed me clues to take away and do for my homework. For once I get to ask the questions, and I want truthful and complete answers. No more games."

She lays her hand on his sleeve and lets him feel the sizzle.

He maintains a warning eye contact like a prisoner withstanding an arm wrestle over the last cigarette. "Have a care, Lizzie. You have no idea what you're capable of."

"Oh. Don't I? Well maybe you can tell me. No, wait, I'm getting an idea. I'm capable of shoving a grownup man six feet sideways into a thicket before the shot aimed at him can get there. Is that ringing any bells for you?" The fire rippling down her arm is meeting his black ink like Hawaiian lava pouring into the sea.

"Lizzie. I will tell you. I always meant to tell you. You can let go now."

She releases him. "Tell me then. What is this key and what else can it do?"

Red moistens his lips. Swallows. He does not touch the arm she held. The air in the car is warm and charged, a front porch right before the first rumble of thunder. Red becomes very still, then says, "Magic."

She waits.

He shrugs, exhaling. His gaze is steady, calculation tempered with tension. He blinks several times.

"Magic," says Lizzie.

"Yes."

"I don't believe you."

"Yes, you do."

She does. "How?"

He sighs. "You and I are not from this world, Lizzie. We came here, both of us, a long time ago."

Night is closing in around the car, clouds of darkness billowing from each gap in the streetlights. Lizzie twists in her seat to face Red, and hear, at last, the truth.

* * *

><p>"Berlin. He's ... also from elsewhere." Lizzie's brain is whirring. She calls on her Quantico training to maintain focus, but even so, in the background there are shifts and clicks as memory slides around into new configurations.<p>

Red nods. "He is."

"Why does he hate you? And me? You said you had to protect me, that he must not find either of us or we would both be killed." Lizzie shakes her head. "What did you do to him?"

Red's brows draw downwards. "I burned his house down. -You don't know what that means. Your house is your whole establishment. Your homes, yes, but also your business, your family, all your associates. I was newly head of a powerful house. Berlin was one of my allies. I ended that."

"People died," she says.

"Some people. His people." His mouth is working. He wriggles his shoulders in irritation. But it is not irritation. Lizzie knows him. It is pain.

"Why? Why did you do it?"

Red pauses. "He took something from me."

"The - magic." The word sounds crazy. Beyond the car, countryside rushes past: woods, a gap with a small town, gas station, a crossroads. Mundane. But in her chest a storm is whirling.

"Magic," he agrees, and in his voice it has a resonant power. "But also he took my strength. My dignity. My ability to protect my own house. He stripped me of everything and proceeded to drag my household into his own."

He stops again. His voice drops. "Without power, revenge can only ever be limited. I burned him but I couldn't bring myself to punish the innocents along with the guilty. He had a family too."

She nods. This part she will come back to. This part is too huge to delve into right now. She brushes it aside for the moment. "But then ... Here. The crime. The trips to China. You went on working for him!"

"I needed to find my power. And of course," he gives a dry smile, "I always planned ot steal it back."

"How could you look him in the eye after what you did?" Unbidden, she thinks of Tom, her fraudulent husband.

"How could he?" Red counters. "Taking my family, my friends, into his own house. My family. My, my wife. He took everything and used it for himself. I had to protect them. If he found out who burned him, they would suffer."

He rubs his hand over his hair. His voice is tired. "So I stayed on. But not nearby. He sent me away and it was a relief. I couldn't stand it. The humiliation." He shakes his head. "I was young. I didn't understand that humiliation is not important. Only life is important."

Lizzie resists an impulse to reach for his hand. It is just the fire, trying to get back to him. "Ok," she says. "So he hates you. I get it. What about me?" In her mind she sees flames and smoke. Is Red responsible for all her scars?

"Berlin stole from me. The fire was a distraction, to disguise my true revenge." Red sighs.

She waits.

"I took something of his. It was mercy and it was vengeance and I never imagined -"

"What did you take from him?" she says.

Red winces. His eyes never waver but he can do that, look you directly in the eye and evade. This time, though, she senses that he is telling a difficult truth.

He draws a breath and speaks, his mouth snapping shut after as if to prevent more truth escaping. "You."


	16. Chapter 16

Dembe keeps looking in the rear view mirror.

"Dembe, don't fuss," says Red.

Dembe says to Red, "The FBI want to speak to you."

"I'll call them back."

"They want to know if you have Agent Keen."

Lizzie leans forward. "Are they on the phone. Let me-"

Dembe shakes his head and points. A unit like a GPS is mounted on the front console. "Police scanner. We are an APB," he says with a smile.

Lizzie falls back. "If we stop Berlin will catch up with us." She knows, she just knows that they cannot outrun Berlin once he finds them. She pushed him away and they fled. It cannot last.

"Raymond. The safe house," Dembe says.

Red sighs. "All right. Federal fugitives can't be choosers."

Lizzie narrows her eyes. "So Berlin and the FBI are hunting us. Me, I'm missing following a disastrous operation. What do they want you for?"

Red waggles his head from side to side in a show of weariness. "Clearly I have kidnapped you. Your phone is off and the last anyone saw of you was you heading into the bushes to tend to my wounds. The natural assumption must be that I have taken advantage of your gentle nature and spirited you away for my own nefarious purposes."

"Which in fact you did," she says. "They just don't know that it was thirty years ago."

Red goes still. Dembe blinks warily at her in the mirror.

Red clears his throat. "It's night. We need to eat and rest. And - you need to give me my power back."

Lizzie nods. "Hmmm." She gazes into the night. They are entering the outskirts of a medium-sized town. "And what if I don't want to?" She turns to face Red.

And for the first time in their relationship she has the satisfaction of seeing him surprised.

* * *

><p>"I could walk away."<p>

She is coldly furious. Dembe is still driving them towards the safe house but any sense of a united plan is gone.

Red says nothing. Cold settles around his heart. He is afraid to speak: - anything he says could influence her either way.

"I could get out of the car now," she says, "call my people and leave you for Berlin. If he comes for me. Well." She shrugs. "I guess we'll see if he can take from me what he got from you."

Red stares at her. She has no idea who she's dealing with. She is going to die.

"I won't leave you," she says. "Because I'm not like you. I can't abandon a vulnerable person in a world full of enemies. I can't let them fend for themselves when they have been ripped away from home with no friends to help. My conscience won't allow it. So I can't."

She is trembling. Red has a powerful moment of deja vu: the four year old in that Brooklyn brownstone, defying his decision to leave her. Lizzie says, "But you should know this, Red. At this moment, I wish I could."

He nods.

"The safe house," says Lizzie. "Where is it? How off the grid is it?"

"Completely."

"OK. Let's go there. Given my colleagues think you've kidnapped or killed me we should probably not check into a Holiday Inn."

He winces. Sarcasm. "All right. The three of us will -"

"No. Just you and me. Dembe makes me feel sorry for you."

Odd. But he does not challenge it. He is in no position to argue anything, and all his instinct - to bluster, to appear nonchalant whilst formulating escape plans - must be ignored because in this case he has only one thing to bargain with and he really doesn't think she wants that. Even assuming she believed in it. It might have once held ancient lore, the art of love and magic, but now -

It is such a battered old thing, blackened and shrunk, clinging to his ribs like the last life preserver on a shipwrecked hull, fish already claiming it as their own, and no one down here in the dim seabed to say different.

And if she acknowledged it, if she took it. What use would she ever have for so meagre a thing as his arcane heart?

* * *

><p>The safe house is a hotel. It is in a side street and it has the kind of blank frontage that suggests either discretion or truly incompetent marketing, but it is a hotel.<p>

"Are you kidding me?" Lizzie hisses as she stands with Red at the front desk.

Red smiles at her and pats her hand on his arm. "Reservation in the name of Smith. Mr and Mrs."

The receptionist nods and fetches their key on a giant wooden fob. "Top floor. Number 707."

"Mr and Mrs Smith. Seriously?" Lizzie says in the groaning elevator. "Like anyone cares if we're married."

"Less memorable."

"A little memorable. Since you're old enough to be my -"

"Let me put an end to that thought forever. Our people don't usually begin a family until their prime. That's around about the late forties. Before then, you're rarely able to conceive, never mind raise children."

Lizzie puts her hand to her breast. "What."

He says nothing.

"I tried. We tried. For years." She is pressing her hand against her collarbone. "They said we couldn't -"

"No. They said they didn't know."

"How did you know-"

He brushes this away. "My point is that I would have to have been truly remarkable to justify any sort of paternal impulse towards you."

The dial above the door drops to the far right with a clang and the door creams open. "Anyway the woman on the desk didn't know any of that and she thought it was weird that we were married," Lizzie says.

"No, she thought it was weird that you held my elbow like an Alcatraz jailer with a grudge and incipient carpal tunnel. Where, exactly, could I go?" He needs her, and is highly unlikely to run. In this mood she might not bother to chase after him. In this mood, she would more likely fell him with a shot to the back of the knees.

Lizzie ignores this. "Why here?" She gestures at the dingy corridor. Room 707 is at the centre. Its brass numbers are out of alignment.

"Did you see the computer system at reception?" he asks.

"No."

"And there's your answer. Berlin can track me very efficiently online, which is why I do not engage in electronic contact wherever it can be avoided. This place uses index cards. There is no internet. They don't have cable tv. And the breakfasts are terrible. So it's perfect." He opens the door to 707 and holds it for her to step inside. She does, gun first, all darting eyes and preposterous stances. He smiles and follows her in.

"You'd be laughing on the other side of your face if Berlin was standing here," she says as he closes and bolts the door.

"If Berlin were here you would be on this unhygienic carpet, writhing as he scraped you clean, and I would already be dead."

She gives him a freezing look.

Red saunters around the room. Everything in it is fairly low quality. The tv has a fishbowl screen. The phone is beige. The minibar is faced with artificial mahogany.

To Lizzie's obvious disgust, he sits on the edge of the king size and bounces. "Quite a wallow here," he observes. "Yes." He nods, punching the mattress a little. "You'll be easily able to keep that iron grip on my elbow."

Liz is attempting to secure the perimeter, or some other such mundane task with an overly grandiose name."The windows don't lock. The phone seems to be a party line -"

"Unplug it -"

"- The chain on the door wouldn't stop a breath of air. This room is not secure." She is standing, clenched and angry, in the centre of the brown carpet.

There is a knock at the door. She whirls, the gun out, her eyes scrunched up.

"Lizzie." He spreads his hands in a gesture of reassurance.

"Shut up!"

"Lizzie. Open the door. This is a scheduled delivery."

"You open it. I'll cover."

He raises his eyebrows but goes. A medium sized note eases into the porter's palm and the coat hangers in their plastic packages are in the room.

Red eyes the delivery and with satisfaction. "Now. I would very much like to get out of these clothes, so will you shower first or shall I?"

She glares at him as he rips open the fine plastic to show a midnight blue pinstripe suit, a perfect gangster item. There is a white shirt and silk tie, cufflinks, socks, underpants. In the bottom of the bag are highly polished shoes.

It is missing one thing. He sees Lizzie about to comment on it, and with masterful timing the porter knocks again. No note this time as Red takes possession of a pure black fedora.

"What?" He says as she tightens her mouth. "You never match the hat to the suit."

Before she can respond he says, "Will you please check that yours are the correct sizes? This was put in place some months ago."

She glances resentfully at him and tears open the other suit carrier. He watches her find the black pant suit, cut slim and sharp the way she wears them to work, and the black blouse, its neck tied with a long strip of fabric. He watches in her eyes the moment she registers that the blouse is silk.

"Shoes in the bottom," he says. He waves a hand. "You should find everything you need."

She picks up deodorant. "Right."

"I suggest if you prefer your showers hot, you go first."

She gives him a weird look.

"There is literally no way of rephrasing that so that it does not sound suggestive," Red says. "The hot water is unreliable. You get first go. I'll be out here, watching the three channels in strict rotation."


	17. Chapter 17

She sits cross legged in the slippery-thin hotel armchair, right of the window, no shadow cast on the floral curtain. Outside and seven floors down, an average downtown commutes home or stays out for dinner or works late in the low rise offices in these business-like streets.

Lizzie pauses, the tiny hotel brush halfway down the slope of her hair. The room is dim and quiet. Red is in the bathroom. The shower is running. There is time.

She picks up the golden key he gave her, and turns it over in her hand. Then she sticks out her arm and points the key at the bed. She has an urge to speak, some kind of abracadabra, some exhortation for the key to work, like the involuntary belly-shriek she let out when she felled Berlin. But she doesn't want Red to hear, so she just frowns her command at the closest pillow: Move!

It flies across the bed and onto the carpet by the door with a defeated flump.

There is a change in the timbre of the shower's gush. Some slight decrease in flow, as if Red has turned it down a notch.

But he does not emerge. Fine.

This time without the key. After all, she didn't need it to throw Red clear of a bullet.

She hurls the next two pillows on top of the first. It barely takes a thought.

Telekinesis, she thinks. -Or poltergeist. Can she levitate things?

A minute later, the comforter says Yes.

In her heart the power is humming, happy to be active. And she can see why Red wants this magic back.

She strips the bed - pillows, blanket, sheets - her control increasing with each attempt, and in her brain the years of deception peel away in weary layers, fast as a four year old unwrapping Christmas gifts, casting the paper away into the dark. She could pick up this bed and smash it into the beige ceiling. She could stamp a hole in the floor and send splintered bed and chair and lamp spiralling into the foyer. She could walk through fire.

"If you're going to sleep on the floor, at least leave me a sheet. "

Red, fully clothed, looms in the bathroom doorway. Lizzie gets out of her chair and resists the urge to levitate him. "I don't need the key," she says.

"No, you don't. You're - awake." He peers at her. "In less than one day, you've awoken. That's a process which generally lasts through puberty and at least two college breakups, by the way. Fascinating."

"How have I not known about this? When did Berlin do this to me?" She gestures, and the bathroom door slams shut.

Red lifts the room service menu, a leatherette folder with printed sheets inside plastic slipcovers. "We should order in. The pitiful selection includes grilled cheese, which is reasonably difficult to get wrong. That said, I had an appalling experience in London once with an item they referred to as a toastie, ugh, sounds like a euphemism for something absolutely filthy in bed, don't you think?"

"Red."

He sighs. Shoots a glance at her over the top of the menu. "You've had the power since you were taken. Berlin has not been near you since."

"And I just forgot about it? In the trauma of the fire?"

He is squirming. The menu lands on the bare mattress.

"What?" says Lizzie, and imagines taking one step towards him, right hand raised.

He flinches as the imaginary hand hovers above him. "Don't. You don't have to do that."

She waits. The force behind her frustration withdraws, folds its steel and orange self back up again.

"The keys," he says. "They have a bit of power trapped in them. Captured from the natural power all around. Even in this world, there's power. It's finite, but it can live in the keys a long time. I never thought I'd be able to start production here, but the Chinese took my design and ran with it. masters of re-engineering, those Macau fellows."

"Red," Lizzie says again.

He wanders about picking at random items in the room. "Anyway. I had one key left when I took you. My power was gone. I was exhausted from running here with you. So I used the key. To make you forget."

She absorbs this. He wiped her mind. What a very Reddington thing to do. And it explains why there have been so few people, over the years, able to testify to his crimes. "Can you make me remember?"

He shakes his head.

"Right."

"Lizzie." He comes forward and stands close to her without touching. They are the same height, Lizzie in her sturdy black boots. "I'm sorry," he says.

She bites the inside of her cheek. How she can even contemplate forgiveness, she doesn't know. But there it is, and with every release of pressure, every use of this otherworldly power, she feels stronger, clearer, calmer.

She is becoming like him. Like he was when she first stepped down towards his cage in the Post Office. She recalls his steady gaze and the warm certainty of his smile. Now she has all the answers, and he is lost.

He is watching her now, blinking calmly. But she is no longer fooled.

"I used to think you were fearless," she says.

He laughs outright. "No.'

She watches his eyes. He does not know what will happen next. In this much at least, they are now equal.

She smiles at him for the first time since she fled with him through the forest. "Let's eat."

* * *

><p>The lights are dimmed and the room service tray is shoved against the door as simultaneous alarm and trip hazard. Lizzie settles back in the armchair and studies Red.<p>

He lies on the left hand side of the hotel bed, ankles crossed, shoes gleaming new, tie loosened just a bit, still in his waistcoat: Red relaxing.

He could not let her die, but kidnapped her. He has made no attempt to steal his power back, but admits previously wiping her memory. Does that make him a good guy or bad?

Neither, she thinks. He is just Red. She believes him, all of it, the magic, the power seeking its way back to him since the moment she took his hand at the bandstand - she believes him, but has not decided what to do. It is hard to think, when she is tired, and overwhelmed, and with Red so careless of the hotel's non-existent security.

Red shifts. He recrosses his ankles, his hat in his hand on the nightstand beside him.

That hat is a symbol of him, she thinks. Not the object itself - he has many hats and does not seem attached to one or other of them - but the idea of it. It is his flourish, she realises, his ability to withstand pain and humiliation, to do unthinkable things and walk away smiling. The buttons show him as protector but the hat is his teeth, the gleaming steel teeth.

"Lie down," he says without opening his eyes. "They've used a surprisingly delightful vanilla fabric conditioner on the linen. Reminds me of Paris."

"Paris smelled of vanilla?"

"I have no idea. I never got out of bed."

Is that meant to be flirtatious? His camp manner makes it hard to tell. On purpose, she is sure. Why be transparent when you can be opaque?

She checks the golden key on its chain. There is no other weapon. Red's gun is gone and her own is out of ammunition. They would have to make armaments out of the furniture or trust to this charm for protection.

Red hums and hahs and shuffles in the bed like a lion finding a good spot in the savannah.

Lions make the females do all the work. Lions mostly laze in the sun, calling out to their womenfolk if there's prey.

Lizzie settles in the armchair, fitting its back to the crook of her neck. As stakeouts go this is not bad. She will nap, still on half alert, and at least this place has aircon.

"Dont be ridiculous," says Red as if hearing her. "You'll ruin your back."

"I'm fine."

"I don't need you to be fine. I need you to be superlative."

That tone. Simple belief in her great abilities. No wonder she has found him so mesmerizing. "I'm not sharing a bed with you. I'll take the chair."

"Don't paint yourself into a corner." Red opens his eyes and looks across at her. "I'm not scoring points. Just rest. I fully accept any argument for sleeping bolt upright in a chair with no lumbar support but will you please come and lie down?"

She figures she can do it with poor grace or good.

"Thank you," says Red and she distinctly hears, Finally. He sits up and removes his tie, his waistcoat. Then he lies flat out again.

She lowers herself onto the far right edge of the bed. No undressing of any kind. She still has her shoes on.

He is a foot away, hands folded on his chest like an effigy, a smug effigy who has won his argument, and once more his eyes are closed.

"Can I turn out the lamp?" she asks with selfconscious politeness.

"Be my guest."

They lie in the dull yellow light which has crept under the door. Noises from the hotel impinge on them through the thin walls. TVs from other rooms. The whine of the elevator, stopping short of their floor. A hair dryer. Lizzie thinks she can locate individual sounds all over this building. None are nearby. She relaxes one or two notches, down to Extreme Vigilance. Her gun is in grabbing distance.

"How nice to sleep with someone," Red remarks in a careless tone. "Just to lie down and close eyes with another human being. It's been years."

Lizzie doubts this. She is pretty sure he sleeps with every woman he meets, in both senses. "Huh."

"Sleep is such a vulnerable time. Like childhood. We are as weak as babies when we sleep and anyone can do anything to us." He is murmuring, his warmth radiating from his arm to hers.

"I'm a very light sleeper," Lizzie says.

"Are you? I sleep like the dead."

An unfortunate simile. Lizzie wonders if this too is flirtation or seduction. Or just Red's sharklike mind running at tangents, full speed as usual.

"I'll wake you if I hear anything suspicious," she says firmly.

"You're a sweetheart," he says, which is very irritating.

She lies still, tense, trying not to fidget. Being annoyed.

He does not move.

If Berlin finds them here they will be defenceless. Whatever her talents might be, she cannot muster them, from sleep, in an ambushed hotel room. And if Berlin bursts in and kills Red -

Her hand is enveloped in a warm firm grip. "We are safe," he murmurs. "I promise you, I would not rest if we were not."

His touch as always is solid and reassuring. He would make an excellent hostage negotiator, she thinks. He engenders trust, until you recall who and what he is.

And what is he? A man from some other world? And what is Berlin then, and what is she herself?

His hand is bright grey in her mind, morning fog settled in a low lying field. She sees her own orange energy fizzling against his pale aura. She is holding it back. She knows already, though, that she will trust him enough to give him all the fire that Berlin trapped inside her years ago. She just hasn't told Red yet.

"We'll move at five," she says.

"Six," he says, squeezing her hand.

There is no point haggling. What would she do if she won, drag him bodily out of bed?

She snorts at that idea, because she absolutely could, but then what? And he chuckles too even though he did not hear her thought. "Six. Ok."

He has not let go of her hand. She sighs. Obliged to sleep. Not relaxing. "Goodnight," she says.

"Goodnight," he says, calmly lifting her hand to his lips and kissing it.

"I should kick your ass," she says as his breath is soft on her knuckles.

"Yes please."

"Why do you insist on flirting?"

"I'm injured! This is not flirtation. It's a straightforward offer on the table." He has her fingers clasped in his, and strokes them with his thumb, once.

Her brain cannot unlock all the possible bluff and double bluff likely from such a habitual liar. "Can we just sleep?"

"That's why we're stretched out on the bed, isn't it?"

"Oh my God." He is impossible. She frees her hand and thrashes about getting comfortable.

He chuckles. "Goodnight," he says again.

"Night."

An urge creeps over her to freak him out. Kiss him, on the mouth. Then turn over and go to sleep as if nothing has happened.

-He would just blink and shrug as if it was no more than his due. He is unbelievably arrogant.

Of course, most of the time the arrogance is quite justified.

And then, that sweet goodnight. Him holding her hand. If he were any other man -

"Whatever it is, just do it," he says. "Your indecision is making the whole room vibrate."

He has now made her impulse impossible. She sighs and moves away a little, the stolen fire seething in her chest as she does. She will ignore impulses born of supernatural powers, and immature fantasies, and she will certainly avoid any act so guaranteed inflammatory as to kiss a man like Red.

But... When his breathing is regular and deep, she leans up on her elbow to look at him.

He seems younger, asleep. The savoir faire has slipped away and she can see, in the line of his cheek, the handsome boy he once was. He is smiling a little and it strikes her that he smiles a helluva lot at her. About a tenth of them are even genuine smiles, as opposed to the crocodile version he favours everyone else with.

She supposes he is reliable. God knows there has been little enough of that in her life.

She sets aside the self pity. For whatever reason, and although he has never touched on the subject, he loves her. That is the only clear thing. And whatever kind of love it is, Lizzie knows that she'll take it.

The steel teeth hat is alone on the nightstand. The buttons are tucked inside the vest over a chair. Red is asleep and unguarded and Lizzie bends over and kisses his cheek lightly.

"Mmmmn." He puts his arms around her - not asleep at all, more lies - and pulls her face into his neck. "Yes."

She just allows it. He is a rock, a beautifully tailored rock with an astonishing affectionate streak, and so she puts her cheek to his shoulder, breathing in his warmth, letting the orange fire fizzle a little against the irreproachable smoothness of his jaw, and tells herself she will wake them both at five just to make her point.


	18. Chapter 18

"I know," Lizzie says.

She and Red are walking, in the dark, along an alley that leads from their hotel to the parking lot where they have arranged to meet Dembe. He has been playing decoy all night, and trying to locate Berlin. Now it is five thirty am and time to move.

Red tilts his head at her while keeping his eyes forward, darting all around: his standard expectation of threat. "Know what?" They are at the end of the alley and the parking lot is empty. Lumps of concrete, knee high, form the perimeter of the lot. There is one gap, next to the one streetlight and the painted sign that proclaims All Day Parking Five Dollar. He doesn't like it. Too easy for an attack to cut off any escape for a car inside the lot. Dembe will choose somewhere else, somewhere Red and Lizzie are better protected. Red just has to see where.

Lizzie starts to answer, but Red gets a shiver of unease down his spine, and years of survival have taught him to trust his instincts. His fingers squeeze Lizzie's elbow briefly and she stops. They both shrink back into the shadows against the shuttered storage units which line the alley.

Lizzie is as composed as ever. He takes a moment to marvel, again, at her strength. In twenty hours she has gone from total ignorance to absolute acceptance of the new reality. And still she is focused and bold. "Is he here?" she asks, and Red knows she means Berlin.

"I don't know," he says. "I can't tell, the way I used to. And you have no idea how frustrating that is."

She turns her head and gives him the intense blue gaze which always sends a thrill from his scalp to his gut, every time. since the moment she saw him manacled and insouciant in the Post Office. "Let me try," she says. "Now I know it's possible. What do I do?"

They are side by side, backs flat to the freezing metal shutters. Their eyes scan the alley and the empty lot off to their left.

Red tries to condense years of training into a sentence. "Think of Berlin," he says. "Try to feel where he is in relation to you."

"Ok." She goes silent.

Red thinks about Dembe and how to get into the car very quickly and do the power transfer. They need to do it as soon as possible - in the back seat?

Dembe has ignored worse.

There are problems, though. Red has only ever experienced a transfer in the other direction, and he was unconscious at the time. He woke up on a table under surgical lights, naked and bleeding. The first thing he saw was the face of one of Berlin's doctors, gaping and amazed that Red has woken up. That Red is not, as they obviously expected, dead.

Red is no doctor. No revenge would compensate for losing Lizzie.

Also - a crucial detail - Lizzie has not yet agreed to the process.

He butts his shoulder against hers. "Remember him," he says.

"I'm trying!"

Hard muscle of her bicep under the jacket. Soft skin inside the black silk blouse. She is iron determination and she is rose petal softness, asleep with her lips on his neck, her left hand clasping his right. Red takes Lizzie's hand now. "Remember Berlin before the fire. How you felt about him-"

"Ah - It's working. I can feel him - like ink spilling on a page -"

"But don't think too hard," says Red, remembering too late another part of the old lessons. "Or else -"

"He's here," says Lizzie. Her face is pale and damp from the effort, and she has inadvertently called Berlin to the very spot.

"Awkward," says Red.

The street light above the parking sign flickers, expands, becomes a tunnel of brightness like a twister made of light. It stretches and whirls and from the tornado's heart Berlin, in a long white raincoat, steps onto the gravel.

Red and Lizzie glance at each other. Berlin is turning his head side to side, scouring the brilliant parking lot for them. They recoil into the darkness as far as they can.

"Get rid of him," says Red, drawing his gun and loading it. "Do what you did yesterday."

"I don't know how I did that!"

"Yes you do. Berlin is going to tear the magic from you the second he spots you. Try!" He cannot fire on Berlin. Death would follow and Lizzie would be taken, along with the remnants of himself.

"I just did it because you were in danger!"

"Ah," says Red. "That's easily arranged."

And he straightens his hat and steps out into the light.

* * *

><p>Lizzie hisses at him but Red takes no notice and she shuffles back, helpless as Red walks straight up to Berlin. Berlin laughs as Red approaches. The light is bleaching all colour from the world and the only noise is from Red's shiny shoes crunching on the rough surface.<p>

"Reddington," says Berlin in a nasal voice. Lizzie cannot identify his accent, which makes sense. "I've been looking for you."

Red gestures all around. "Here I am."

Berlin raises his hand. "I'm taking back what you stole. Both things."

"That's not your decision " says Red. "It never was."

Berlin flicks his fingers and Red crashes to the ground as if shot. "My daughter!" Berlin stands over Red. "Mine to bid here and there and wherever I see fit. Not yours."

"Not mine," Red says, voice hoarse. His arms are loose and limp beneath him. Berlin is pinning him down with one hand held in the air.

Lizzie moistens her lips. She has to act but can she be quick enough?

"I took you into my house," Berlin spits at Red, "and you betrayed me. You swore allegiance to me and all the time you were keeping her prisoner in this vile place." He puts his boot on Red's chest.

Red clears his throat. "This place has sunlit beaches and coconut palms. I never knew what a bikini was until I came here."

"Where is the girl?" demands Berlin.

"Don't try to pretend that you're driven by paternal fondness," Red whispers as Berlin's boot presses into his neck. "When you have my power back, you'll kill her."

Berlin laughs. "Your sentimentality always made you weak. I should make you watch. But then again, I'm losing patience." He lifts his foot for the final blow and Lizzie screams.

The scream travels across the lot, head height, a streak of flame with a razor edge. It catches Berlin in the throat and tears at his eyes.

Red scrambles up, coughing. He ducks low, like a marine avoiding the rotors of a Chinook, and stumbles to Lizzie as hooded men and women appear from the streetlight, sprinting through the howling tunnel towards their master.

When Red reaches Lizzie she bats him behind her with his arm. Her fire is ready to rip Berlin apart but his people grab him and drag him back into the tunnel.

Lizzie exclaims and shoots flame at them but the tunnel closes and the streetlight, caught by a force like two rocket launchers, folds over into a molten tangle and lies smouldering.

Red pulls out a phone Lizzie never knew he had. "Dembe. Now." He doubles over and starts rasping, hacking, clawing for breath.

The car screams round the corner and Lizzie, panting hooks her arm round Red's shoulders and lifts him towards it. She pulls on the door, which weighs as little as an envelope in her hand, and bundles Red inside.

* * *

><p>They stop eventually at a gas station on a back road. Dembe fills the car, then goes to pay and fetch coffee. Red and Liz get out, stretch, and lean against the car breathing the fresh morning air.<p>

"I know why you're scared," Lizzie says. She has been watching him this whole time. And his manner towards her is different. It's not just the oddness that follows intimacy. Lizzie reckons she and Red can brush off far worse than sharing a pillow, even, waking up in crumpled clothes, legs tangled and his arm flung heavy across her back. No: the change is a deference that was not there before. And Red has always treated her as his equal.

"Why is that?" he asks. He does not deny the fear.

"I'm Berlin."

His cheek twitches. He turns his face to her, his eyes steady behind the sunglasses. "What?"

She says, "You've been afraid all these years because you thought you couldn't stand against Berlin. Nobody could. You thought Berlin had access to double the power. Yours and his. But he didn't. I do. So now I'm Berlin."

He blinks, stares at her.

"That's why I'm going to give it back," she says. "Because one person shouldn't be invincible."

"Double the power," he repeats, ignoring her last sentence.

She sighs. "Mine and yours. I am his daughter, right? So I've got my own power, plus yours. I don't even know what to do with that knowledge."

Red's mouth opens. He blinks rapidly. This world. He says. "This" - he taps his chest - "it's crippled my reason. I have been utterly, utterly blind." He clasps her to him beside the indifferent Lexus, crushing his face into her hair.

"Uh - " She can hardly breathe with the force of his hug but it seems rude to use magic to lever him away.

He sets her free. "Forgive me." He is reaching in his coat pocket. "Of course you have your own power. You were never in any danger of becoming -"

His eyes go distant, working it out. "Yes. I think we can do it. Antoinette," he says into the phone he has found in his coat. He clutches Lizzie again, absently presses his lips to her mouth and releases her. "I'm coming to see you. Yes, now. I have exactly the kind of job you enjoy."

Dembe arrives with coffee in three paper cups.

Red says "The nearest airfield, please, Dembe. There's been a change of plan. Agent Keen and I have an urgent date with a voodoo queen in the Bronx."

"The Bronx," says Lizzie.

"Voodoo," says Dembe and curls his lip.

Red turns to Lizzie. "Madam Antoinette, a top notch voodoo practitioner and a wonderful woman, once you get past her habit of keeping live adders inside her blouse." He shudders dramatically. "Two scaly heads poking out through her cleavage, their beady eyes following you around the room. Quite the Medusa of backstreet magic providers. She'll toss a little powder around and mutter incantations, but she will know exactly how to split a single source of power into two."

Lizzie stares at him. "Right. Ok." He seems completely unaware of kissing her. But then, he is like that -extravagantly effusive with his underworld cronies, impulsive and affectionate with his true friends. It means nothing. Especially given the fact that he is some kind of alien.

But then so is she.

-Too weird.

Dembe says, "I don't like this voodoo."

"I know," says Red. "That's why you won't be coming in with us. Just take us, then wait in the car."

Dembe is unimpressed. "I'm not a child. You will need my protection."

"Always," says Red.

"No. Not for long," Dembe says. He looks at Lizzie.

Red goes to him and embraces him. "I will always need you," he says, and kisses him too, both cheeks. "I only hope I can one day return all the favours you've done me over the years."

Dembe appears mollified. "There is nothing to return," he says.

Lizzie goggles at this exchange. Red, his arm about Dembe's shoulders, draws her in too. "My new house," he says, and bursts out laughing.

Dembe looks at Lizzie. Neither of them knows what to make of any of it.

"Well," Red says, snapping back into business mode. "Let's go."

At which point the sky erupts in a maelstrom of helicopters and loudhailers, the trademark calling card of the FBI. And a man with a white coat draped over his shoulders and black ink brimming in his chest, strides out of nowhere towards Lizzie.

* * *

><p><strong>Author's note -<strong> I am partly offline whilst travelling to see family so this has not been checked as rigorously as usual. If/when you spot typos and holes please let me know and I will fix it when I am back in the world of working WiFi. I have been desperate to get to the next scene so am posting this ch now even though I ought to wait for proper signal etc.. Hope you liked it! -Sef


	19. Chapter 19

"We don't have long. But there should be time."

They are striding through linoleum corridors, rattling door handles, glancing ahead and behind at each intersection. At the far end are stairs. Red runs up them with Lizzie following, her gun ready as if that could stop the vengeance they know is in pursuit.

They had a stroke of luck when the FBI team shot at Lizzie. Berlin shot back and Red, Dembe and Lizzie clambered into the car and raced away.

At the first sign of industrial development along the highway Red makes Dembe stop. "Go," he says as the Lexus draws up behind a rundown office complex. "We'll work out the thing. You go and I'll see you later." He gets out, tugging Lizzie with him.

"I should stay," Dembe says.

"You're nothing to either side and I can't have you in the crossfire. Go." Red claps Dembe on the shoulder and Dembe guns the engine. In seconds he is gone.

Red turns to Lizzie. "We have a problem."

"The FBI and Berlin both hunting us like treacherous dogs?"

"The fact that I have no real idea how this transfer thing works. Do you trust me?"

"Have you ever lied to me?"

"No."

Lizzie studies him for two beats of her heart as the helicopters roar closer. Red is pale, his eyes tired. But his gaze, and his hand around her arm, are steady. He is as reliable as he ever was, and that's more than most things in her life. She nods. "Then let's go." Lizzie bashes apart the padlock and they race into the office building.

Now they are inside searching for a suitable place for their peculiar tryst. At least half the search time has been cringeing procrastination.

The top floor is as barren as the rest. "Here," says Red, picking a door halfway down. He tries the handle. Locked.

He looks at Lizzie, but instead of using the gun, she simply wrenches the handle with her fist and her power combined, and the lock bursts free.

She shrugs at her own acknowledged power, and they go inside.

It is a small room, like an office used by a janitor or building supervisor. There is a desk, some open shelving, a filing cabinet. A phone sits on the desk with its cord wrapped neatly round it. The window leads to a narrow balcony, more of a ledge, probably intended as decorative rather than a place to take the air. Someone has put potted plants out there though. They are dried out to a sickly yellow.

Red shuts the door, and jams the filing cabinet against it.

He takes off his hat and lays it on the desk. "Well then."

Lizzie puts the gun beside the fedora. "Ok. What's the deal?"

Red winces. "You give me your power, I take it. It's a two way process. You can't force me to have it. But I could probably take it from you once I have enough of it back."

"Kind of a delicate balance," she says, and flushes because he is looking at her with eyes gone dark. "How do we -"

"There are a number of ways," Red says in his most casual tone.

Lizzie does not need any kind of enhanced power to know that sex is one of them.

"Extremes of emotion can lead to unintentional partial transfer," he says. Lizzie thinks of him comforting her in the bandstand. "To do it in full and in cold blood - it's a little harder. And I would expect that it's kind of exhausting. We should probably - "

He whips off his coat and casts it onto the shiny grey floor. Holds his hand out to her. She takes it, already trembling and more do when she feels his heat, the tension of years, in his touch.

They sit, the silk cool on Lizzie's palms, and Red says, "Skin contact," and his voice cracks. He coughs.

"How much," she says, trying for businesslike and clinical.

"As much as you're comfortable with."

"What are you comfortable with?"

"You know me, Lizzie. I'm comfortable anywhere."

That is his profile. At ease in all situations. "This could get crazy," she says. Her hand is on the key at her throat.

"Yes." That flat affirmative she loves, like a complete meal in one word.

"I. I'm ok with that."

He breaks into a smile. "I know. We are more similar than you think."

He raises his eyebrows - May I? and undoes her coat. She flinches as his fingers brush her skin.

She says, "I should," gesturing at his shirt, his vest.

"Feel free."

She reaches across and realises they are sitting too far apart. "Maybe if I -"

She puts her arms around him. He relaxes against her as she lowers them slowly to the floor and begins unbuttoning his shirt.

"Mmn yes," he says, rolling his head back. "In the stationery cupboard with the homecoming queen. It's like Cluedo."

She gives a surprised laugh. "More like poker. I can see you as the Knave."

"The Jack of both sides? Maybe. Come close. I'm a little shy."

She gazes at him, biting her lip, then shifts and brings her skin to his. Silver fire pitches within him. The hair on his chest tickles. She tries to calm her breathing. "This is already beyond crazy. Tell me what to do."

Red doesn't answer, just closes his eyes. His hands are splayed on her back, fingers opening and closing.

Lizzie sighs. That is distinctly not part of the task. She doesn't need her memory back to know that. Then he moves his hand down her spine, slow, clasping her to him, and she sighs again without having meant to.

"Are you all right," he murmurs, eyes shut, his face five inches from hers on the winter tree-patterned lining of his coat.

"Yeah." And in fact, she is. They are here together and all the barriers and lies are receding and Red is running his hand from her shoulder to her ribs and murmuring appreciation. Why has she held back?

She clings to him, caressing his hair, the nape of his neck. At this reciprocation, he props himself to lounge on his right elbow, accepting her touch with eyes half closed.

She parts his shirt, watching interest and amusement swirl in his eyes. But as she slips the fine cotton from his left shoulder, his expression changes. You would have to be in his space to see it: a flicker of fear, immediately replaced with defiant nonchalance.

Her hand on his bare shoulder meets mottled skin. She raises her eyes to his in question but he gives nothing back. As her palm finds a slew of texture across his shoulder blades, she shifts and sits up to look.

His back is marked by scars. Lizzie slides over to lie behind him and look. Burns cover his shoulder blades in two large teardrop shapes. She blinks. In this grey light, the shadows enlarged and stretched, the scars look like -

"Every culture has that myth," he says. "I've never found out if we are the originators."

She traces the ghost of wings across his back. She cannot ask.

"It's not a literal thing," he says. He rolls over to face her. "Those scars are from when Berlin attacked me, robbed me. I'd always thought it was a fairy tale, the scars of stolen power, but I was proved wrong."

"But I don't have -"

"You are still whole," Red says, picking up her hand. He turns her scorched palm up to the light, kisses her burn. "And here is a small sign of where you were given more. I should have known."

"Would you just have taken it back from me?" She knows the answer but wants to hear him say it. This is not romance, after all.

"Without a shadow of hesitation," he says.

"That might have been better," she says.

"No."

She waits.

"A war born of fresh grief - that's a thing to avoid. My youth and my pain could have destroyed worlds. Millions were saved by my ignorance."

"I'm afraid," she says then.

He loops a lock of her hair over his index finger, lets it play out over his skin. "Why?"

"Of a war that's going to happen anyway."

"My appetite for death is gone," he says.

"But is his? People will die."

Red shakes his head. "Only he will die. I will bring him to the spot and destroy him. That's all."

"Execution," she whispers.

"It's the same mercy he showed my family," Red says and that is the first time she has heard him admit what happened.

"Red -"

Kisses cannot heal that level of pain. She lays her hand on his shoulder again and watches his eyes. After a moment he blinks and rubs a knuckle over his left eye.

"Ok," she says. "Do it."

He touches her cheek. Silver and orange energy ripples between them. "You're sure."

"I'm sure."

"It will hurt. Come here."

"I should probably - "She flings off her blouse. They shuffle together, heart to heart, and their noses bump.

"I know this doesn't have to be a sexual thing," says Red evenly, his eyes searching hers. "But I have no idea how that would work."

He smiles, and for once the sardonic mask falls and she sees humour and frank affection. And as she continues to gaze at him, this man who has ripped away her life and shown her a new one, she sees desire.

"It's all right," he says, and she does not know if he means all right to do what seems obvious, or not.

The fire is roaring in her chest, yearning to return to its true home. She has her arms around the only person who treats her honestly, who gives her dignity. He is here, and looking at her with naked longing, and he is beautiful, and so she kisses him.

* * *

><p>That first tenderness soon turns to intensity. He has imagined this moment many times, alone on the couch, pretending to sleep on his jet, gazing from the bulletproof window of his car. He pictured them alone, close, private, (naked). But he never imagined her passion.<p>

She kisses him tentatively at first, as if concerned that such an oldtimer might not know what to do. Wrong assumption, and when he lets her know it, with his hands sliding up her bare back and over the lace straps of her bra, she catches on and gives it right back to him.

That orange fire is pouring off her and he has to remember to breathe and accept it in. He breaks off from the kiss and pulls her face into his neck like that first time in the hotel. This is not comfort, this is not deliberate ambiguity. This is self control because otherwise he would notice her hands on his back, fingertips exploring his spine, and instead of thinking about power he would be urging her to slide her hands lower and even lower while he murmurs that despite apearances and his perpetual cynicism she is special to him, dear to him, and he loves her -

"Red," says Lizzie, her chin on his temple. Her skin against his chest is hot and damp, her breasts pressed soft against him. "I heard something-"

Already he is regaining his strength. It is like espresso, espresso for every part of you. He sends his hearing out through the door and detects footsteps, several floors down. "Dammit."

The transfer is incomplete and they are half naked. He springs up, pulling her by the hand. She grabs her blouse and throws it on. He shrugs on his shirt.

The room swims around him. He had forgotten how much detail there is in the world if you can only see it. But the cotton weight of bond paper or a watermark on the fifth page in a stack, do not help them now with Berlin on his way up the building.

Lizzie stands still. The pain of their contact, the energy gushing out of her with their first kiss, is fading. She feels light, as if she could float. Red's energy has been like mercury in her belly her whole life. Without it she feels free. She knows she has not given him all of it yet - the metallic churning in her gut tells her that most of it, in fact, is still with her . But the relief of it - more space, it feels like - has cleared her head and her heart. She feels ten years younger. She feels free. And daring.

Not a literal thing, he said. Yet now she can see the sky in layers, stepped like the sides of a temple in a Peruvian jungle, leading up to the stratosphere or down, in great leaps, to the ground.

"The balcony," says Lizzie. Her blouse is back on but hanging open. Red is throwing his coat around his shoulders.

She taps the glass and the window crashes open . "Come on." She grabs his hand. He scoops up his hat.

She clambers out onto the two foot wide shelf outside the window. Her body sways and Red exclaims, but she doesn't fall.

"Lizzie. Can you do this?"

"I don't know. Will you help me?"

"Always," he says, and wraps his arms around her. "You should push power to me, keep the transfer going." He touches his collar bone to indicate.

She looks into his fond face. "Trust me," she says.

"I have never doubted you," he says.

She smiles. Sounds are increasing, of gunshots and doors being kicked in. Lizzie clutches Red. Skin to skin, the air crackles around them "Then shall we?"

"Let's."

She embraces him with a wicked smile, then presses her mouth to his and steps off the roof.


	20. Chapter 20

Sex and death and power are intertwined in mythology. Have one, deserve the second, gain or lose the third. Lizzie thinks of Red saying that power exchange happens during times of extreme emotion. She guesses this counts.

Red's coattails fly out, and like Lizzie's hair, the silk whips in the wind. All around them is a noise like breaking china, and although she cannot see them, Lizzie imagines she can feel the glass buttons on Red's coat burning, molten globes pressing on her midriff.

She tries to focus, to give whatever she has, to him. Red knows what to do, or he doesn't, no more than she does, but anyway they are doing it. They are falling, flying, slipping through shells of reality, each layer of air breaking beneath their impact like a crust of caramel on a creme brulee, then onwards through atmospheres like custard and then through to a silent realm where they drift, arms around each other, hair floating out from Lizzie's head. Red looks around and sighs.

"Last one," he says. He presses his cheek to hers. His voice vibrates in her ear. "Keep going. Keep going or we fall," he says.

"What is this place?" she asks, but he shakes his head.

"Focus, Lizzie. Send everything to me. I'm tired. But we can do it."

She pushes her face into his shoulder and imagines orange fire entering his chest, giving him strength, power, the peer to save them from a terrible impact, the power to save both worlds -

He is speaking as they pick up speed. She senses him glowing, becoming hard steel, becoming unbreakable. But there s still a black spot at his centre, a stain she cannot reach with all her trying, a black flaw which she has to rub out.

"Stop," says Red.

She feels sleepy. A well has opened in her chest and her fire is pouring from it, turning from sunrise to ochre, to umber, to black. She has made a hole, a gaping space in her heart. She is not making the black spot smaller, instead it is sucking her fire into itself and it hurts and she is tired. But Red is here and he holds her tightly. In his arms she can rest. When she wakes up it will be over.

"Lizzie. Stop. Please."

She opens her eyes. His are silver. "Stop," he says in a voice layered with command.

She jolts and feels her heart racing, then faltering, then slowing, dropping away like she and Red are dropping, plummeting through clouds of moist droplets to a bland bright shore where she can rest. And then nothing.

* * *

><p>Red opens his eyes and takes in the landscape: turquoise sea; a glaring sky; warm sand made from the ground skeletons of a millions corals. Ten feet in front of him, yellow and purple fish flit in the glassy shallows. Behind him are manicured palms and a dirt path leading towards a distant thatched hut.<p>

He has found the place, then. He sighs, collapses to his knees.

That jet might become redundant, but for the fact that on a jet you can sit, shoes off, with a drink in your hand, and make phone calls.

He swallows away the last cloying taste of the journey. He feels pretty good, travel sickness aside. The energy transfer has worked. Everything is fixed, thanks to her.

He looks at Lizzie, drooping in his arms. Her face is very pale. "No." He sets her down in the scorching sand. "Lizzie. Talk to me."

Her chest is not moving.

Red breathes in and out and ignores memories of a funeral procession across a rainswept peak. He lays his hands over Lizzie's sternum. All seems still but he forces himself to search, sending fine feelers over her, and there it is, one tremor of motion. He closes his eyes. "Lizzie." He focuses, frowning. "Elizabeth."

Around them, the sand whips up and the ocean lifts into peaks like castles, like palaces. Clouds form overhead, shaped like flames.

Lizzie coughs.

"Thank God," says Red, out of sheer habit of a life lived mostly on earth. He smooths his hand over her forehead and in his chest, pulls her energy free of his. "Go. Go back. You are not mine."

She is orange heat around his heart, fire in his legs, strength in his arms. As he is now, he could crush planets, bring stars to life.

Those things don't interest him.

He disentangles her fire and sends it back to her.

Lizzie opens her eyes. "Where are we? Is Berlin dead?"

He loves that about her. Peril, death, then immediately straight back on the job with her hair tangled and her eyes all smudged. "No," he says. "We're safe for a little while. But then he will find us and try to kill us."

She tries to sit up.

"Don't," says Red. "You gave me too much. You're weak."

She ignores this and sits. He leans back on his haunches. She is looking around suspiciously. "Is this...home?"

He throws back his head and laughs. "Oh my goodness no. Not even close." He chuckles, and pats her shoulder. "This is south China. A little place I have. A B and B, actually. I'm a fantastic host."

He helps her to her feet.

"We travelled through... Shells of sky," she says. "Like cracking eggs."

"Yes," he says. "But I brought us here, not the homeworld. That travel is just one way of getting here."

Lizzie touches the sand. She rubs the dust of ancient coral between her fingers. "I thought we would go to you, our, home."

"I could never leave Dembe," says Red.

"How safe are we?"

"He will find us. But I think we have tonight. Your colleagues are slowing him down nicely."

She looks up at the sky. It is deepening, blueing towards twilight.

Red puts his arm around her shoulders and they trudge through crystal sand toward the hut.


End file.
